forms of discrimination (sexuality, ability, religion) on college campuses. Colleges and universities find themselves confronted with students who want fairness, yet who bring very different experiences and needs to campus. Initially, colleges in the US recruited and served groups one at a time, offering, for example, special programs for African Americans, Latinx groups, women, gays and lesbians, veterans, returning students, and persons with disabilities. As the list grew, it became clearer not only that this one-group-at-a-time approach was slow, but that most students fit into more than one category. First-generation college students could include Latinos, women, poor whites, returning veterans, grandparents, and transgender women and men. In this context, intersectionality can be a useful analytic tool for thinking about and developing strategies to achieve campus equity.
Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that they need better frameworks to grapple with social problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, African American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs concerning jobs, education, employment, and healthcare simply fell through the cracks of antiracist social movements, feminism, and unions organizing for workers’ rights. Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and action above others; for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within feminism, or class within the union movement. Because African American women were simultaneously black and female and workers, these single-focus lenses on social inequality left little space to address the complex social problems that they face. Black women’s specific issues remained subordinated within each movement because no social movement by itself would, or could, address the entirety of discriminations they faced. Black women’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool emerged in response to these challenges.
Intersectionality as an analytic tool is neither confined to nations of North America and Europe nor a new phenomenon. People in the Global South have used intersectionality as an analytic tool, often without naming it as such. Consider an unexpected example from nineteenth-century colonial India in the work of Dalit social reformist Savitribai Phule (1831–97), regarded as an important first-generation modern Indian feminist. In an online article titled “Six Reasons Every Indian Feminist Must Remember Savitribai Phule,” published in January 2015, Deepika Sarma suggests:
Here’s why you should know more about her. She got intersectionality. Savitribai along with her husband Jyotirao was a staunch advocate of anti-caste ideology and women’s rights. The Phules’ vision of social equality included fighting against the subjugation of women, and they also stood for Adivasis and Muslims. She organized a barbers’ strike against shaving the heads of Hindu widows, fought for widow remarriage and in 1853, started a shelter for pregnant widows. Other welfare programmes she was involved with alongside Jyotirao include opening schools for workers and rural people, and providing famine relief through 52 food centers that also operated as boarding schools. She also cared for those affected by famine and plague, and died in 1897 after contracting plague from her patients.
Phule confronted several axes of social division, namely caste, gender, religion, and economic disadvantage or class. Her political activism encompassed intersecting categories of social division – she didn’t just pick one.
These examples suggest that people use intersectionality as an analytic tool in many different ways to address a range of issues and social problems. One common use of intersectionality is as a heuristic, a problem-solving or analytic tool, much in the way that students on college campuses developed a shared interest in diversity, or African American women used it to address their status within social movement politics, or Savitribai Phule advanced women’s rights. Even though those who use intersectional frameworks all seem to be situated under the same big umbrella, using intersectionality as an analytic tool means that it can assume many different forms because it can accommodate a range of social problems.
In this book, we examine multiple aspects of intersectionality but, for now, we want to show three uses of intersectionality as an analytical tool. In line with Cho et al.’s argument that “what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term ‘intersectionality,’ nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations,” our focus is on “what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (2013: 795). Our cases of how intersecting power relations characterize international football, the growing recognition of global social inequality as an intersectional phenomenon, and the emergence of the black Brazilian women’s movement in response to specific challenges of racism, sexism, and poverty illustrate different uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool. Specifically, they suggest how intersectional analyses of sports illuminate the organization of institutional power, how intersectionality has been used to diagnose social problems, and how intersectional responses to social injustices enhance activism. These cases both introduce important core ideas of intersectional frameworks and demonstrate different uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool.
Power plays: the FIFA World Cup
Across the globe, there is no way of knowing exactly how many people play football. Yet surveys by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) provide a good guess: an estimated 270 million people are involved in football as professional soccer players, recreational players, registered players both over and under age 18, futsal and beach football players, referees, and officials. This is a vast pool of both professional and amateur athletes and a massive audience that encompasses all categories of race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, nation, and ability. When one adds the children and youth who play football but who are not involved in any kind of organized activity detectable by FIFA, the number swells considerably.
Intersectionality’s emphasis on social inequality seems far removed from the global popularity of this one sport. Yet using intersectionality as an analytic tool to examine the FIFA World Cup sheds light on how intersecting power relations of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality organize this particular sport, as well as sports more broadly. Rich nations of the Global North and poor nations of the Global South offer different opportunity structures to their youth to attend school, find jobs, and play sports, opportunity structures that privilege European and North American nations, and that disadvantage countries in the Caribbean, continental Africa, the Middle East, and selected Latin American and Asian nations. These national differences align with racial differences, with black and brown youth from poor countries, or within neighborhoods within rich ones, lacking access to training and opportunities to play. Girls and boys may want to play football, but rarely get to be on the same teams or compete against one another. As a sport that highlights physical ability, football brings a lens to the phrase “able-bodied” that underpins analysis of ability. At its foundation, football is big business, providing financial benefit to its backers as well as to a small percentage of elite athletes. Differences of wealth, national citizenship, race, gender, and ability shape patterns of opportunity and disadvantage within the sport. Moreover, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the patterns of their intersection determine which individuals get to play football, the level of support they receive, and the kinds of experiences they have if and when they play. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool illuminates how these and other categories of power relations interconnect.
Because it is a global phenomenon, the FIFA World Cup is a particularly suitable case to unpack in order to show how intersecting power relations underpin social inequalities of race, gender, class, age, ability, sexuality, and nation. Power relations rely on durable, albeit changing, organizational practices that, in this case, shape the contours of FIFA World Cup soccer regardless of when and where the games occur and who actually competes. Four distinctive yet interconnected domains of power describe these organizational practices – namely, the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal. These domains of power are durable across time and place. FIFA’s organizational practices have changed since its inception and have taken different forms in Europe, North America, continental Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Yet FIFA is also characterized by tremendous change brought on by new people, changing standards, and
