Overview - Dossier: Uses of Intersectionality - Political Struggles and Theoretical Reflections (Mediações, vol. 30, n.1 – 2025/1).

Organizers: Marcella Beraldo de Oliveira (UFJF) and Marilis Lemos de Almeida (UFPEL).

The concept of intersectionality, coined in 1989 by the black jurist Kimberlé Crenshaw, has its roots traced back to the 1970s, with reference to the debates brought by black social activists and intellectuals. In the United States and Britain, notable works include the anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara in the 1970s titled "The Black Woman"; the manifesto "A Black Feminist Statement" and the "Combahee River Collective Statement," both released in 1982; and Angela Davis's book "Women, Race, and Class" from 1981.

In Brazil, black activists also pointed out the need to consider the uniqueness of their social situation. Lélia Gonzales (1984) proposed a politically engaged theoretical perspective within the social sciences, constructing an Afro-Latin American feminism, addressing, among other issues, the weight of the myth of racial democracy on black women. Beatriz Nascimento (2006) highlighted that black women epitomize the structure of domination most forcefully: because they are women and because they are black. As another example, Sueli Carneiro (2021) emphasizes the importance of blackening feminism, given the singularity of the historical experience of black women in our country, arguing that racism amplifies genders through privileges stemming from the exploitation and exclusion of subordinate genders.

The intersectional perspective has unveiled new analytical possibilities, both in academia and in social movements, renewing the ways of addressing systems of oppression and inequality, explicitly bringing academic debate into the political arena. It is widely recognized that systems of domination rest upon (and reinforce) social classifications such as gender, race, class, sexuality, generation, nationality, among other categories, reconfiguring and resignifying these categories themselves in each context experienced by diverse social actors. This debate has produced theoretical and empirical constructions that have reconfigured the "place" of analytical reflection, bringing other perspectives to topics already consolidated in the field of social sciences, establishing dialogues with anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles, as discussed, for example, by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser in "Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto" (2019) and with non-Western black feminism by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (2021). Adding to the anti-colonial or decolonial critical debate (a term used more recently) by authors such as Kabenguele Munanga (1999) and Archie Mafeje (2019), bringing a critical perspective on the bases of Western categorizations and philosophies of classifying the world. Similarly, there is an encounter with cultural studies in the development of the conceptualization of notions such as hybridity (Bhabha, 2010), diaspora (Gilroy, 2012), and in the construction of identities (Avtar Brah, 2006), strengthening the idea that identities are relational, flexible, and products of social dimensions, experience, subjectivity, and identity itself, challenging fixed conceptions of identities, converging and reinforcing the concept of intersectionality.

In this direction, an important step is taken with the intersectional approach in treating the inseparability of identities and the indissociable effects in the production of power hierarchies and systems of subordination, bringing focus to the life experience of individuals in each context. The intersectional perspective has undoubtedly operated an epistemological, analytical, methodological, and political turn that has transformed social analyses and political practices. Above all, by establishing a commitment to social justice, through radical critique and political struggle for the emancipation of black women.

Despite the rapid diffusion of the concept and its extensive mobilization in both political and academic fields, there remains a great heterogeneity regarding its understanding, fueling the debate around the meanings of this political-theoretical-methodological category. This aspect was pointed out, for example, by Collins and Bilge in the book "Intersectionality" in 2016, and in the preface of the translation of the book into Portuguese by Bueno (2020). Similarly, Henning (2015) highlights that despite the significant volume of texts and debates on Intersectionality, there is no cohesion in theoretical perspectives, considering that there is a vigorous and heated profusion of contemporary views on this concept. At the same time, Intersectionality " (...) tends to be seen as theory, method, approach, paradigm, concept, heuristic concern, 'lens of social analysis,' basis of analytical work, analytical metaphor, etc. (HENNING, 2015, p. 101 - 102).

This is precisely one of the aspects that propels the proposition of this Dossier, together with the reception of the debate in Brazil and Latin America and its implications for strengthening struggles for social justice. The proponents' experience with organizing a Dossier on the theme (ALMEIDA; SPOLLE; OLIVEIRA; MELLO, 2022), as well as coordinating GT at SBS (2023, GT 9) and ANPOCS (2023, GT 25), revealed a multiplicity of perspectives on intersectionality, and even among those authors who use this concept, significant variations in conception are observed. While for some, intersectionality is umbilically linked to black femininity and political activism, reconnecting it with black feminism and with anti-capitalist and decolonial perspectives, its potential lies in the descriptive capacity of the social relations structuring social life, which sustain systems of oppression and matrices of domination that mutually reinforce each other, privileging dimensions such as gender, race, or class, not necessarily in that order. Others mobilize intersectionality to think about articulated and contingent relationships that situationally produce forms of domination.

On the one hand, there is a good reception of this perspective, evidenced by the increasing use of the term, but on the other hand, criticisms of it also proportionally rise, announcing that the debate about how new this approach really is, about its limits and potentialities, is far from over. One of the "most relevant criticisms is about the weakening of the political dimension of intersectionality and the distancing from the central points of the debate, related to radical critique and the emancipation of black women." (ALMEIDA; SPOLLE; OLIVEIRA; MELLO, 2022, p. 9).

In this direction, Collins (2017) locates in the diffusion within the academic sphere and the popularization of the term the origin of its distancing from the initial purposes, recalling that "in black women's movements, the intersection between gender, class, race, and sexuality aimed to denounce interpenetrating forms of oppression and, at the same time, to think about the emancipation of black women" (ALMEIDA; SPOLLE; OLIVEIRA; MELLO, 2022, p. 10). For the author, intersectionality gradually distanced itself from the once-central aspects, to the point of being detached from the commitment to social justice and from people's experiences. BILGE (2018) similarly speaks of a superficial use of intersectionality, related to its increasing appropriation by academia and the minimization of the centrality of race.

Another set of criticisms, systematized by Hirata (2014), points out as the central point of controversy the risk of dilution in the category of intersectionality of fundamental social relations, more precisely class, gender, and race, in favor of the "variable geometry intersectionality", which would include other relationships such as age, religion, sexuality, region, and others, placing categories of analysis and social relations on the same level.

Such criticisms do not invalidate the contributions of intersectionality but point to interpretative differences and varied uses that somehow refer to what HERTZOG and MELLO (2020) consider one of its great contributions, which is the "break with hierarchical views that tend to analyze inequalities and mechanisms of oppression in hierarchical terms." In this sense, the potential of the concept and even its pertinence seem to reveal themselves especially in the analysis of individuals' experiences and how, in a intertwined and transversal way, multiple systems of subordination operate.

The proposition of this Dossier aims to offer a set of articles that deepen and systematize the reflections and research results that are taking place in the field of social sciences. We suggest privileged axes to be: (i) discussions about the political and emancipatory potential of the intersectionality category, based on empirical experiences; (ii) the advances achieved through its use in the fight against the invisibilities of different forms of oppression; (iii) uses of intersectionality as a concept, limits, and possibilities, as well as the different meanings attributed to it; (iv) historical analysis of the emergence of the concept and its link with social engagement and political activism, and (v) methodological strategies that operationalize the intersectionality concept in empirical research. On another front, we can think of intersectionality from thematic axes that articulate debates about gender, sexuality, class, generation, nationality, race, without losing the political focus that points to how social inequalities are constructed and reaffirmed in specific contexts chosen for analysis.

Thus, this Dossier is open to perspectives that articulate the issue of identity classifications with the anti-capitalist struggle, Afro-Latin American approaches, brought by black and non-Western feminism, the anti-racist and feminist struggle, which dialogue with other perspectives, such as criticism of Westernism and decoloniality.