Question

How do Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge define ‘intersectionality’?What are the‘core ideas’ and ‘domains of power’ of the intersectionality framework formulated by Collins and Bilge?

800 WORDS

Answer 1

Introduction

The concept of intersectionality has become a central topic in academic and activist circles alike.Since the early 21st century, the idea of "intersectionality" has been widely discussed by scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists in Canadian and international contexts. In 2016, Patricia Hill Collins, a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Sirma Bilge, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, posited that contemporary configurations of global capital that fuel and sustain growing social inequalities foster a rethinking of gender, race, and class as distinct social categories of identity, postulating that systems of social oppression are mutually constituted and work together to produce social inequality. Intersectionality was the culmination of their work.

Intersectionality opens with an insightful conversation on the definition of intersectionality as an analytic tool for understanding complexity in the world, diversity of people, and individual experiences. It then pays special attention to intersectionality as critical inquiry and praxis since interpretations of intersectionality may underestimate the influence of practices, especially how the intersecting of power relations is vital for understanding social inequality. By examining the importance of historical needs of intersectionality beginning in the 1960s to 1970s female African-American movements, Intersectionality documents the transitions from social movement politics to institutional incorporation, thereby framing the impact of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis. It then traces global dispersal within human rights and equality policy arenas and integrates the idea of digital media and new information and communications technologies into the discussion. By examining how intersectionality travelled into these perspectives, Collins and Bilge are able to differentiate between critical inquiry and praxis. Furthermore, they expound on the critical articulations of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, demonstrating the complexity in how an individual politic of identities emerges within various compositions of interlocking systems of oppression.

Collins and Bilge then expand on their earlier arguments by indicating that the growing social protest against social inequalities stirs up the local milieu, constituting new forms of social interrelations in a neoliberal.

The domains-of-power framework is a heuristic device for examining the organization of power relations. This heuristic can be used to analyze systems of power,either singularly or in combination, e.g., the organization of racism as a singular system of oppression (see., e.g., (Collins 2009, 40-81), as well as intersecting systems of power. The heuristic can also be used to analyze resistance to oppressions, for example, the singular histories of anti-racism or feminism, as well as their convergence within intersectional feminism.