Intersectionality. Patricia Hill Collins

Preface

      The time is right for this new edition of our book. People around the world face new and unprecedented social issues concerning the environment, women’s reproductive issues, the resurgence of far-right politics, food security, militarism, and migration. This context of global social change is a major catalyst for this new edition, in which we revisit and sharpen our analyses of intersectionality. In making our revisions, we opted to leave the structure of the original book intact and instead deepen our main arguments and conclusions by providing new case studies, updating information, and placing more emphasis on global issues. We make intersectionality’s growing global reach more visible and, by doing so, highlight its analytical and political usefulness for addressing important social issues.

This new edition continues our process of developing ideas in conversation and writing collaboratively. Intersectionality mandates doing this kind of dialogical intellectual work. Because our collaboration can be taken as an example of intersectionality’s global reach, we thought we would share a bit about our process. We first met in 2006 in Durban, South Africa, at the 16th World Congress of Sociology, the first meeting of this international group of delegates from more than 150 countries to be held in continental Africa. Patricia was a keynote speaker early on in the week-long event, and Sirma, a new assistant professor, was a presenter in the intersectionality session organized by Nira Yuval-Davis. By happy coincidence, we took the same bus on a field trip to the Kwa Muhle Apartheid Museum and to townships that bore the effects of apartheid. We had our first – albeit all too brief – conversation during that tour. Six years later, we met again at the 6th International Congress of French-Speaking Feminist Research (Congrès international des recherches féministes francophones) in Lausanne, Switzerland. This grouping had been meeting since the mid-1990s in different cities across the French-speaking world, from Paris to Dakar to Rabat to Ottawa. The Lausanne conference, with its theme “Interlocking power relations and the discriminations and privileges based on gender, race, class and sexuality,” brought together some 610 delegates, feminist scholars, and activists from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East. This time, we were both on keynote panels. Afterwards, we struck up a conversation that we continued during a visit to the Musée de l’art brut, a small but striking museum that contained work by groups that had been considered outsiders, such as the art of psychiatric inmates. During this visit, we discovered that we shared similar perspectives not just on the conference and our sensibilities concerning intersectionality; we learned that Sirma is a painter, that Patricia is a dancer, and that the arts infuse our intersectional sensibilities. While we didn’t know it then, our collaboration for this book had already begun.

This book, then, is the result of a true collaboration. Neither one of us could have written it alone. We felt the need for a book that would introduce the complexities beyond the audiences with whom we both felt comfortable. We started our conversation from our different locations within inter-sectionality and worked our way toward carving out points of connection. Sirma writes about intersectionality in French and English within a francophone academic context of the linguistically restless Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) situated on the unceded Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) territory, where the competition between French and English overshadows indigenous language struggles. Acutely aware of the problems of translation across her three languages of Turkish, French, and English, Sirma brings a commitment to situating intersectionality within global frameworks and the geopolitics of knowledge. Always mindful of her roots in a working-class, African American neighborhood in Philadelphia, Patricia writes for academic audiences and general readers in US and UK contexts. Her work is widely recognized, yet the demands of helping to institutionalize intersectionality in the academy has limited her involvement in activist settings. During many conversations, we hammered out the arguments that we felt would be most useful to our readers.

      We could see how we complemented one another and knew that the ideas that could travel across the kinds of differences that shaped our own lives were likely to be the strongest ideas for intersectionality. One core premise of intersectionality concerns the relationships between ideas, practices, and, in this case, the execution of this book. This entailed working through and across many differences. Yet we quickly found out that dialog is hard work. In a sense, we lived our material via the process we chose to follow in writing this book. Don’t get us wrong! It is not as easy as it sounds, and there is nothing romantic about that. It involves labor and it creates tension – but generative tension.

      There were so many moving points to this kind of conversation and, by implication, to the kind of work that intersectionality must do. The process involved getting fluent in each other’s language of intersectionality, in each other’s ways of putting things together, in each other’s perspective and perception. We also needed to speak several languages, for intersectionality is everywhere, and it is polyglot: it speaks the language of activism and community organizing as much as it speaks that of academia or of institutions. It speaks to young people through social media and popular culture and to established scholars through journals and conferences. These different fields of practice

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