(The Politics of Intersectionality) Angelia R. Wilson (Eds.) - Situating Intersectionality - Politics, Policy, and Power-Palgrave Macmillan US (2013)

The Politics of Intersectionality
The Politics of Intersectionality series builds on the long-standing

insights of intersectionality theory from a vast variety of disci-
plinary perspectives. As a globally utilitzed analytical framework
for understanding issues of social justice, Leslie McCall, Mary
Hawkesworth, and others argue that intersectionality is arguably
the most important theoretical contribution of women’s and gen-
der studies to date. Indeed the imprint of intersectional analysis
can be easily found on innovations in equality legislation, human
rights, and development discourses.
The history of what is now called “intersectional thinking” is
long. In fact, prior to its mainstreaming, intersectionality analysis
was carried for many years mainly by black and other racialized
women who, from their situated gaze, perceived as absurd, not just
misleading, any attempt by feminists and others to homogenize
women’s situation, particulary in conceptualizing such situations
as analogous to that of racialized others. As Brah and Phoenix
point out, many black feminists fulfilled significant roles in the
development of intersectional analysis, such as the Combahee
River Collective, the black lesbian feminist organization from
Boston, who pointed out the need of developing an integrated
analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of
oppression interlock rather than operate separately. However the
term “intersectionality” itself emerged nominally from the field of
critical legal studies, where critical race feminist Kimberle Williams
Crenshaw wrote two pathbreaking articles, “Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex: A Critique of Antidiscrimination
Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” and “Mapping
the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color.” At nearly the same time, social theo-
rist Patricia Hill Collins was preparing her landmark work, Black
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of
Empowerment, which characterized intersections of race, class, and
gender as mutually reinforcing sites of power relations.
Both Crenshaw and Collins gave the name “intersectionality”
to a far larger and more ethnically diverse trajectory of work, now
global in nature, that speaks truth to power sited differentially
rather than centralized in a single locus. What could also be called
intersectional analysis was in fact developing at roughly the same
time among European and postcolonial feminists, including, for
example, Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1983; 1992); Brah (1996);
Essed (1991); Ifekwunigwe (1999); Lutz (1991); Meekosha, and
Min-ha (1989). Indeed it seems, in a manner parallel to that which
Sandra Harding characterizes the evolution of standpoint theory,
that intersectionality was an idea whose time had come precisely
because of the plethora of authors working independently across
the globe to make vastly similar sets of claims. Around the world,
those interested in a more comprehensive and transformative
approach to social justice—whether sociologists, legal scholars,
feminist theorists, policy makers, or human rights advocates—have
used the language and tenets of intersectionality to more effec-
tively articulate injustice and advocate for positive social change.
The books in this series represent an interrogation of intersec-
tionality at various levels of analysis. They unabashedly foreground
the politics of intersectionality in a way that is designed to both
honor the legacy of earlier scholarship and activism as well as to
push the boundaries of intersectionality’s value to the academy
and most importantly to the world. We interpret the series title,
The Politics of Intersectionality, in two general ways:
First, we emphasize the politics of intersectionality, broadly con-
ceived; that is to say we include debates among scholars regarding
the proper conceptualization and application of the term “inter-
sectionality” as part and parcel of the series’ intellectual project.
Is intersectionality a paradigm? Is intersectionality a normative
political (specifically feminist) project? Is it a method or epistemo-
logical approach? Is it (merely) a concept with limited applicability
beyond multiply marginalized populations? Our own idiosyncratic
answers to these questions are far less important than the open
dialogue we seek by including them within the scholarly discourse
generated by the series.
What this means pragmatically is that rather than dictatorially
denote an extant definition of intersectionality and impose it on
every author’s manuscript, as series editors our task has been to
meaningfully push each author to grapple with their own concep-
tualization of intersectionality and facilitate their interaction with
an ever-growing body of global scholarship, policy, and advocacy
work as they render such a conceptualization transparent to read-
ers, reflexive as befits the best feminist work, and committed to
rigorous standards of quality no matter the subject, the method,
or the conclusions. As editors we have taken such an active role
precisely because grappling with the politics of intersectionality
demands our adherence to the normative standards of transpar-
ency, reflexivity, and speaking to multiple sites of power for which
intersectionality is not only known but lauded as the gold standard.
It is our honor to build this area of scholarship across false bound-
aries of theory and praxis; artificially distinct academic disciplines;
and the semipermeable line between scholarship and activism.
No less importantly we emphasize politics to mean, well, poli-
tics, whether everyday senses of justice; so-called formal politics of
social movements, campaigns, elections, policy, and government
institutions; or personal politics of identity, community, and activ-
ism across a broad swath of the world. While this general concep-
tualization of politics lends itself to the social sciences, we define
social sciences in a broad way that again seeks to unite theoreti-
cal concerns (whether normative or positive) with interpretive and
empirical approaches across an array of topics far too numerous to
list in their entirety.
The second way we interpret the series title—simultaneously, as
one might expect of intersectionality scholars—is with an empha-
sis on the word intersectionality. That is, the books in this series
neither depend solely on 20-year-old articulations of intersection-
ality, nor do they adhere to one particular theoretical or method-
ological approach to study intersectionality; they are steeped in a
rich literature of both substantive and analytical depth that in the
twenty-first century reaches around the world. This is not your
professor’s “women of color” or “race-class-gender” series of the
late twentieth century. Indeed an emphasis on up-to-date engage-
ment with the best and brightest global thinking on intersection-
ality has been the single most exacting standard we have imposed
on the editing process. As series editors we seek to develop manu-
scripts that aspire to a level of sophistication about intersectional-
ity as a body of research that is in fact worthy of the intellectual,
political, and personal risks taken by so many of its earliest inter-
locutors in voicing and naming this work. We thus relate to inter-
sectionality as both methodological and analytical tools that are
firmly rooted in the epistemological tradition of the feminist situ-
ated gaze but do not necessarily prioritize discussion of gender
relations over other cross-cutting social, economic, and political
power relations.
Series Editors:
Ange-Marie Hancock, University of Southern California
Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London
Also in the series:

Solidarity Politics for Millennials
Ange-Marie Hancock
Social Change and Intersectional Activism: The Spirit of Social
Movement
Sharon Doetsch-Kidder
Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance
Zenzele Isoke
Gender Equality, Intersectionality and Diversity in Europe
Lise Rolandsen Agustín
Situating Intersectionality: Politics, Policy, and Power
Edited by Angelia R. Wilson
S i t uat i ng I n t e r sec t iona l i t y
Politics, Policy, and Power
Edited by
Angelia R. Wil so n
SITUATING INTERSECTIONALITY
Copyright © Angelia R. Wilson, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-02511-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
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the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-43876-1 ISBN 978-1-137-02513-5 (eBook)
IDOI 10.1057/9781137025135
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the

Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my students in their designer French outfits, their faded
jeans, their actually-scruffy-not-trendy-clothes, their hijabs,
brown skin, white skin, black skin, Irish green eyes, girly make
up, comfortable middle-class smiles, covered in buttons against
war, for human rights, unions, and Gay Pride, with defiant,
rebellious voices in Swedish/Mauritian/Australian/Spanish/
American/Mancunian accents, who inspire me to think
about differences—and about values worth sharing.
C on t e n ts
Series Introduction: The Politics of Intersectionality xi

Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Angelia R. Wilson
1 Intersectionality from Theoretical Framework to
Policy Intervention 11
Wendy G. Smooth
2 Intersectional Advances? Inclusionary and
Intersectional State Action in Uruguay 43
Erica E. Townsend-Bell
3 ID Cards as Access: Negotiating Transgender (and
Intersex) Bodies into the Chilean Legal System 63
Penny Miles
4 International Adoption as Humanitarian Aid: The
Discursive and Material Production of the
“Social Orphan” in Haitian Disaster Relief 89
Kate Livingston
5 Gendered Subjectivity and Intersectional Political
Agency in Transnational Space: The Case of Turkish
and Kurdish Women’s NGO Activists 107
Anil Al-Rebholz
6 Gender Variance: The Intersection of Understandings
Held in the Medical and Social Sciences 131
Ryan Combs
x C on t e n t s
7 Intersectional Analysis at the Medico-Legal Borderland:

HIV Testing Innovations and the Criminalization of
HIV Non-Disclosure 157
Daniel Grace
8 Crossroads or Categories? Intersectionality Theory and
the Case of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Equalities
Initiatives in UK Local Government 189
Surya Monro and Diane Richardson
Notes on Contributors 209

Index 213
S e r i es I n t roduc t ion:
Th e Pol i t ic s of
I n t e r sec t iona l i t y
Currently intersectionality scholarship lacks a meaningful clear-

inghouse of work that speaks across (again false) boundaries of a
particular identity community under study (e.g., black lesbians,
women of color, environmental activists), academic disciplines,
or the geographical location from which the author writes (e.g.,
Europe, North America, Southeast Asia). For that reason we
expect that the references of the chapters will be almost as helpful
as the chapters themselves, particularly for senior professors who
train graduate students and graduate students seeking to immerse
themselves broadly and deeply in contemporary approaches to
intersectionality. We are less sanguine, however, about the pleth-
ora of modifiers that have emerged to somehow modulate inter-
sectionality—whether it be intersectional stigma, intersectional
political consciousness, intersectional praxis, post-intersectional-
ity, paradigm intersectionality, or even Crenshaw’s original modes
of structural and political intersectionality. Our emphasis has been
on building the subfield rather than consciously expanding the
lexicon of modes and specialities for intersectionality.
In the fifth book in this series, Situating Intersectionality:
Politics, Policy and Power, editor Angelia Wilson has curated a
set chapters from a successful conference of the same name in
the United Kingdom, and marks several firsts in our Politics of
Intersectionality series. Wilson turns our attention for the first
time outside of the United States, exploring the constructions of
intersectionality and their applications in the European Union,
the UK, Uruguay, Turkey, and elsewhere. This edited volume is
thus an important consideration of the geographical dispersion of
the term intersectionality and also a recognition of overlapping
xii Se r i e s I n t r oduc t ion
considerations among policy practitioners and scholars with ques-

tions of inclusion, social movements, and representation around
the world. The ongoing need to render the invisible “visible” is as
true in the global context as it is in the United States.
Second, Wilson’s effort marks the first edited volume of our
series—a notoriously difficult type of project, due to the efforts
required to herd overcommitted academics to meet deadlines,
respond to a variety of comments and revisions, and to do so
in a timely manner. Wilson’s yeoman effort allows us to explore
grounded answers to two key questions: How can intersectionality
help us articulate, listen to, and understand individual experiences
of politics and policy? What does this teach us about political strat-
egizing and the possibility, or not, for political solidarity? These
questions remain critical in the twenty-first century, and are part of
a long-standing set of questions activists, policy practitioners, and
scholars must grapple with across dimensions of marginalization.
As always, we welcome additional submissions for future install-
ments of The Politics of Intersectionality series as it enters its third
year as a site for groundbreaking contributions to intersectional
scholarship and activism.
A c k now l e dgm e n ts
This collection emerged from an international conference,

Situating Intersectionality, sponsored by the Women and Politics
Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association (UK). The
event was hosted by the Politics Department of the University of
Manchester. All of the contributors to this collection would like to
thank them for that support, particularly the hard work of Rainbow
Murray. In addition, I would like to thank Wendy Smooth, Paisley
Currah, Cynthia Burack, and the Politics of Intersectionality series
editors, Ange-Marie Hancock and Nira Yuval-Davis, who offered
commentary on chapters and provided clarity and direction to the
themes explored here. Finally, for endless cups of tea and patiently
listening to me “pip on” about this project, I would like to thank
my partner, Sarah, and our kids, Joe and Grace.
I n t roduc t ion
Angelia R. Wilson
Situating Intersectionality brings together academics working in

the discipline of politics who are employing the analytical lens of
intersectionality to articulate specific ways in which political insti-
tutions, policies, and political engagement define, marginalize, and
(dis)empower. In the context of political science, an intersectional
analysis can bring a nuanced understanding to the particularities
of policy outcomes and to discussions of structural and political
dynamics of power. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, such nuance
can be lacking, for example, in analytical approaches framed in
identity politics: “the problem with identity politics is not that
it fails to transcend difference . . . but rather the opposite, that it
frequently conflates or ignores intragroup difference . . . ignoring
difference within groups contributes to tension among groups”
(1991, 1242). Crenshaw warns that intersectionality is not being
offered “as some new, totalizing theory of identity” (1991, 1244).
Instead, intersectionality offers an analytical frame that focuses
clearly on the dynamics of power. Her empirical work delineates
three different aspects of intersectionality: structural intersec-
tionality, political intersectionality, and cultural intersectionality
(1991, 1254–1282). The first recognizes that the embodiment of,
and relations between, multiple identities as defined in sociopo-
litical categories results in very different individual experiences.
Individuals locate themselves, and are located, in relation to the
intersections of various structural definitions of “identity” and the
resulting experiences can engender diverse outcomes regarding,
for example, politics and policy. Second, political intersectionality
refers to the ways in which different categories of citizens engaged
in identity politics may disempower and marginalize each other,
perhaps unintentionally. Finally, representational intersectionality
2 A ng e l i a R . W i l s on
notes how cultural constructions can disempower and reproduce,

for example, racial and gender hierarchies.
In her article “Multiple Inequalities, Intersectionality and the
European Union,” Mieko Verloo reflects on Crenshaw’s distinc-
tions. Concentrating on the first two she notes that “structural
intersectionality occurs when inequalities and their intersections
are directly relevant to the experiences of people in society,” and
political intersectionality indicates “how inequalities and their
intersections are relevant to political strategies” (2006, 213). She
laments that much of the academic discussion about intersection-
ality has focused on the former: “strikingly, almost no reference
is made to the concept of political intersectionality . . . very little
attention is paid to both structural and political intersectionality
in policy-making” (2006, 214). The contributions here speak to
this gap and draw upon the wealth of academic discussion that has
developed since Crenshaw’s initial conceptualization. As political
science academics, two key concerns emerge from the authors in
this collection: How can intersectionality help us articulate, listen
to, and understand individual experiences of politics and policy?
What does this teach us about political strategizing and the pos-
sibility, or not, for political solidarity? In this brief introduction,
I want to call attention to some of the literature addressing these
two questions.
First, how can intersectionality help us articulate, listen to, and
understand individual experiences of politics and policy? Answers to
this question often imply a direct comparison, that is, “better than
identity politics” or “better than a class analysis.” Unsurprisingly
then, some express concern that intersectionality may obfuscate
the distinctive dynamics of power in relation to, and within, dif-
ferent identity categories (Skeggs, 2006 as noted in Phoenix and
Pattynama, 2006). However, as Ange-Marie Hancock explains in
Solidarity Politics for Millennials, identity politics conceptualizes,
for example, race and gender as parallel phenomena and this can
lead to an oppression olympics with groups competing for the title
of being the most oppressed in order to gain political support of
dominant groups (2011). But these olympics leave the overall sys-
tem of structural inequality unchanged. Likewise, a multiple, or
additive, approach leads to “competition rather than coordination
among marginal groups” rather than transforming the logic of
distribution (2007, 70). Intersectionality, Laurel Weldon clarifies,
I n t r oduc t ion 3
focuses on the interaction of different structures of inequality

resulting in a more developed picture of oppression and discrimi-
nation (2008). The intent is not to homogenize the experience
of inequalities or marginalization but to widen the possibilities
to articulate fluidity, political, and temporal specificity. In terms
of an analysis of politics, policies, and political movements, it is
important then to envision the relationship between intersection-
ality and identity politics not as an “either/or” but working in
“conjunction with” in order to map the dynamics of power.
Intersectionality keeps the analytical gaze steadily on the
dynamics of structural power: mapping the fluidity and temporal-
ity of identity construction resulting from the fluidity, tempo-
rality, and adaptability of that power. Johanna Kantola and Kevät
Nousiainen note that “intersectional approaches explore the ways
in which domination, subordination and subjects are constructed
in particular locations and contexts” (2009, 462). For example,
categories of inequality differ regarding “dimensions of choice . . .
visibility . . . and change” (Kantola and Nousiainen, 2009, 468;
see also Hancock, 2007, 63–70). For Gill Valentine the appeal
of intersectionality is in “the emphasis it places on the complexity
of and fluidity in the ways that identities are unmade as well as
made, and undone as well as done” (2007, 18). In Intersectionality
and Beyond, the authors conceptualize intersectionality as offer-
ing an understanding of how inequalities are “routed through one
another and which cannot be untangled to reveal a single cause”
(Grabham et al., 2009, 1). In this collection, Smooth explains that
intersectionality not only “troubles” essentializing notions of iden-
tity but it also enables a recognition of the ways in which identities
shift and change over time just as the institutions delineating them
shift and change. This emphasis on particularity within a context
of various power structures facilitates a detailed understanding of
political outcomes. Nira Yuval-Davis notes: “in specific historical
situations and in relation to specific people there are some social
divisions which are more important than others in constructing
specific positionings” (2006, 199). To this end, the contributions
in this collection deploy intersectionality in order to map specifici-
ties of experiences resulting from the dynamics of structural and
political power.
This brings us to the second thematic question underpinning
this collection: What does this teach us about political strategizing
and the possibility, or not, for political solidarity? Psychologist

Erica Burman observes: “abstracting any single dimension of
‘difference’ as a focus of concern or intervention is inevitably—
conceptually, politically and therapeutically—inadequate” (2003,
297). For Burman, the invidious modality of identity politics
“divides and fragments so as to render alliance and coalition nigh
on impossible.” Without an intersectional frame, political strat-
egies may be built upon inaccurate maps of power or, at least
ones lacking indications of potential pitfalls or opportunities for
allegiances and collaboration. Verloo points out that “different
inequalities are dissimilar because they are differently framed”
and therefore it is crucial to “ground policy strategies not only
in the similarity, but also in the distinctiveness of inequalities”
(2006, 221). Continuing she argues that identity politics or addi-
tive approaches are “in danger of ignoring differences in the
political goals at stake, because they tend to conflate social posi-
tion and identity with political position and opinion . . . they pay
almost no attention to existing power struggles within organi-
zations, and thereby make these struggles opaque and danger-
ous to the democratic process” (2006, 222). This overlooks the
“political dimension of equality goals” (2006, 223). For example,
those working the context of the European Union have argued
that gender mainstreaming and any subsequent additive approach
to the equalities agenda ignore the complexities of identities (see
articles in Egeland and Gressgå rd, 2007). Kantola and Nousiainen
call for close examination of the political processes underpinning
such “intersectional discrimination” where several grounds of
discrimination “interact with each other simultaneously” (2009,
468). Their argument resonates closely with Hancock’s analysis
that the governance structures that led to the gender mainstream-
ing establish hierarchies of inequalities and competition for scarce
financial resources and political goodwill. Because of this additive
approach, Verloo argues, more attention “to structural mecha-
nisms and to the role of the state and the private sphere in repro-
ducing inequalities is much needed” (2006, 211). Continuing she
details the political agenda:
The fact that inequalities are dissimilar means that such “equality”
mainstreaming cannot be a simple adaptation of current tools of
gender mainstreaming. Whether one thinks of checklists, training,
impact assessment or expert meetings, a clear conceptualization
of how intersectionality operates, a theory of the power dynamics

of a specific inequality, as well as a choice for a clear political goal
will be needed. Moreover, the fact that multiple inequalities are
not independent means that such “equality” mainstreaming can-
not be a simple extrapolation of gender mainstreaming. If intersec-
tionality is at work in strategies against inequalities, then new and
more comprehensive analytical methods are needed and methods
of education, training and consultation will have to be rethought.
(2006, 222)
Whether or not one adopts this particular political agenda, it

serves as a testament to the necessity for an intersectional analy-
sis highlighting the dynamic relationship between political struc-
tures, identity formation, and policy outcomes. A new generation
of political science scholars, comfortable employing intersectional
analysis, are framing the particularities of individual experiences
within the complexity of policy making in an increasingly small,
technologically connected, and ideologically nuanced public
square. This collection gives voice to these scholars whose empiri-
cal research spans the Welsh countryside, the Turkish hinterland,
the streets of Chile, Uruguay, Poland, Spain, England, and the
great (political) state of Ohio.
Wendy Smooth, in chapter 1, calls for political scientists to
“operationalize intersectionality” in order to disrupt identity
categories and staid methods of categorizing and quantifying
procedures that define identities and experiences. For Smooth,
intersectionality is concerned with “the systems” that give identi-
ties meaning. Political science can bring “clarity to the conversa-
tion and the processes by which multiple identities are constituted”
and how they evolve and “interact with political institutions,
structures and movements.” Deployed in conjunction with other
methodological tools, intersectionality complements, disrupts,
and enhances our understanding of politics, political activism, and
“hidden power differentials” of governance through legislative
and judicial action (Hancock, 2007). In opening this collection,
Smooth establishes the “core foundations” of intersectionality by
drawing upon her own extensive research regarding the experi-
ences of African American women legislators who face a “matrix
of domination” (Collins, 1991). These core foundations sit at the
heart of the conceptualization of intersectionality informing the
remaining chapters.
Throughout this collection, authors draw upon an intersec-

tional analysis to make sense of the diversity of activism appearing
as various populations respond to influences from identity poli-
tics of race, feminism, and LGBT movements. Erica Townsend-
Bell considers how we identify intersectional advances to assess
“whether states act intersectionally and the conditions under
which they might do so.” Through her research in Uruguay, she
identifies differences between activism that leads to intersectional
outcomes and activism that leads to only inclusionary outcomes.
In doing so, she establishes conditions for intersectional outcomes.
For her, a crucial key to securing intersectionality-based policies
is for activists, working together, to learn to make coherent inter-
sectional demands in a language understood by the institutions of
the state.
The articulation of intersectional goals, as each author here
notes, is difficult as activism stretches across essentialized identity
categories. Some voices may be heard while others are not. Penny
Miles considers how judicial activism—or activism via litigation—
can undermine intersectional understandings of identities and
structures of oppression. Taking the requirement of ID cards in
Chile as a starting point, Miles shows how media representations
perpetuate cultural normativity that privileges some transgender
citizens over others. Despite moments where intersectional out-
comes fall short of desired goals, some discussion in the public
square of transgender issues has facilitated a broadening of issues
and the emergence of professional expertise in legal as well as
activist circles.
Media and political discourses are at the heart of the intersec-
tional analysis offered in chapter 4 by Kate Livingston. Focusing
her analytical lens on the language and power informing “disaster
relief,” Livingston argues that in the context of the 2010 earth-
quake in Haiti, one can trace the construction of the “social
orphan” through expedited international adoption as a form of
humanitarian aid. Her fascinating account of this discourse demon-
strates “how this political category is produced by raced, classed
and gendered processes that engender and maintain hierarchical
relationships among groups.” This construction perpetuated and
promoted institutional policies that maintain international sys-
tems of inequality and ignored possibilities of strengthening inter-
nal capacities within Haiti.
In chapter 5, Anil Al-Rebholz raises questions about the role of

nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in importing and defin-
ing feminism in Turkey. The original empirical data considered by
Al-Rebholz tells a story about the nature of solidarity within femi-
nist activism and about the dynamics of transnational feminism.
Listening to the voices of Kurdish and Turkish women working in
NGOs, she draws attention to the institutionalization of feminism
via transnational interventions or, in her words, the “NGOisation
of the movement.” However, another theme emerges as she lifts up
the stories of how Kurdish women understand their relationship
with Turkish feminists. While Western-educated Turkish feminists
have imported feminist ideas, Kurdish women charge that they
have only told part of the story: the story of white, liberal American
feminism. In response, Kurdish women have appropriated the ideo-
logical and political positioning of African American feminists such
as Angela Davis and bell hooks. As one interviewee notes, while
Turkish feminism focuses on gender identity, “we think . . . feminism
is more than this.” Using the work of Yuval-Davis, Al-Rebholz gives
a compelling account of “multiple intersecting sources of subordi-
nation” embedded in hegemonic power relations, including those
found within the production of feminist knowledge.
Over the last 20 years, the UK has developed a raft of equalities
policies. In the wake of what appears to be commitment to equal-
ity in the public square, those directives are beginning to filter into
the social practices affecting every citizen. It is in these moments,
where the rubber meets the road, that one can see how policy
implementation attempting to facilitate inclusion has struggled
precisely because it emerged from a politics based on essentialized
conceptualizations of identity. As Ryan Combs demonstrates in
chapter 6, at the intersection of medical and social science dis-
course on gender variance, multiple constructions of identities
often have to give way to pragmatic negotiations within established
policy parameters. “Ambiguity makes policy making difficult” and
because of this Combs sees a need for persistent reflective analysis
regarding how policy articulations effect individual constructions
of identity. He argues against rationalization or resignation in the
face of complexity but challenges policy makers and the medical
community to be more open to dialogue that rejects essentialism,
listens to variation, and is more open to critical examination of
structural issues such as rationing medical services.
In chapter 7, Daniel Grace employs Intersectionality-Based

Policy Analysis (IBPA) to better understand the complexity
between medical technologies and policy outcomes framing work
around HIV/AIDS prevention in Canada. He outlines the par-
ticular difficulties at the intersection of criminal laws to prosecute
alleged cases of HIV non-disclosure and of medical technolo-
gies encouraging early stage detection. The IBPA methodologi-
cal approach allows policy analysts to detail clearly the problems
at such an intersection and, in doing so, it illuminates possible
ways through such policy difficulties. In Grace’s own words, inter-
sectionality requires “that complex, historically situated factors”
including “principles of equity, power and social justice” be inte-
grated meaningfully as part of any response to HIV as a public
health issue.
In the final chapter, Surya Monro and Diane Richardson offer a
detailed analysis of lesbian, gay, and bisexual equalities initiatives in
UK local government. Given the significant extension of equalities
policies across the UK, it is important to take stock as to how these
are implemented, what effects they have on embodied citizens, and
importantly what service providers think they are doing when they
“do equality” at the coalface. For anyone, in any country, thinking
ideologically or concretely about desired equalities policies, Monro
and Richardson’s robust analysis of UK policy outcomes offers
substantial fodder for contemplation. As Townsend-Bell noted, it
is important for activists to demand intersectionality if we desire
outcomes that reflect this ideal. Returning to the challenge set
by Wendy Smooth to think about the interaction between inter-
sectionality and political science, Monro and Richardson’s contri-
bution details a balanced methodological approach that calls for
“attention to specific categories . . . as a means for achieving depth
of analysis and as a way of developing intersectionality into some-
thing that can be applied at the institutional level.” Alongside this,
they note that there should be “attention to the interstices . . . [as] it
enables sensitivity to other social characteristics, such as the mate-
rial, ability, faith, and age” in order to give a more complete pic-
ture of social forces routed through each other.
The voices in this collection provide informed, empirically
grounded answers to the key questions: How can intersectionality
help us articulate, listen to, and understand individual experiences
of politics and policy? What does this teach us about political
strategizing and the possibility, or not, for political solidarity? The

researchers here carry a methodological toolbox in which inter-
sectionality has become a familiar implement for helping under-
stand the fluid, interlocking world around them. In addition, the
global nature of this research testifies to the adaptability and use-
fulness of this tool. The application and usage may itself change
over time and the tool may wear at different points from the vari-
ety of deployments in culturally and disciplinary specific contexts.
Nevertheless, intersectionality facilitates a nuanced articulation
of the specificities of individual experiences of politics and policy,
and in doing so it can aid us in refining political strategies and in
discerning possibilities, or not, for political solidarity.
R eferences
Burman, Erica. 2003. “From Difference to Intersectionality: Challenges
and Resources.” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling
6(4): 293–308.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality,
Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford
Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299.
Egeland, Cathrine, and Randi Gressgård. 2007. Nordic Journal of Women’s
Studies 15(4): 207–209.
Grabham, Emily, with Didi Herman, Davina Cooper, and Jane Krishnadas.
2009. “Introduction.” In Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power
and the Politics of Location, edited by E. Grabham, D. Cooper,
J. Krishnadas, and D. Herman. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish.
Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2011. Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide
to Ending the Oppression Olympics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2007. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition:
Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm.” Perspectives on
Politics 5: 63–79.
Kantola, Johanna, and Kevät Nousiainen. 2009. “Institutionalizing
Intersectionality in Europe.” International Feminist Journal of Politics
11(4): 459–477.
Phoenix, Ann, and Pamela Pattynama. 2006. “Editorial: Intersectionality.”
European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 187–192.
Valentine, Gill. 2007. “Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality:
A Challenge for Feminist Geography.” The Professional Geographer
59(1): 10–21.
Verloo, Mieke. 2006. “Multiple Inequalities, Intersectionality and

the European Union.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3):
211–228.
Weldon, Laurel S. 2008. “The Concept of Intersectionality.” In Politics,
Gender and Concepts: Theory and Methodology, edited by G. Goertz
and A. Mazur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.”
1
I n t e r se c t iona l i t y f rom
Th eor e t ic a l Fr a m e wor k to
Pol ic y I n t e rv e n t ion
Wendy G. Smooth
Intersectionality, the assertion that social identity categories such

as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability are interconnected and
operate simultaneously to produce experiences of both privilege and
marginalization, has transformed old conversations while inspir-
ing new debates across the academy. Intersectionality encourages
recognition of the differences that exist among groups, moving
dialogue beyond considering only the differences between groups.
Originating from discontent with treatments of “women” as a
homogenous group, intersectionality has evolved into a theoreti-
cal research paradigm that seeks to understand the interaction of
various social identities and how these interactions define societal
power hierarchies. Intersectionality encourages us to embrace the
complexities of group-based politics by critically examining the
variances in social location that exist among those claiming mem-
bership in groups.1
At the same time that intersectionality helps to make sense of
the experiences of people who find themselves living at the inter-
sections of social identities, intersectionality also is concerned
with the systems that give meaning to the categories of race, gen-
der, class, sexual identity, among others. In other words, at the
societal level intersectionality seeks to make visible the systems of
oppression that maintain power hierarchies and organize society
while also providing a means to theorize experience at the indi-
vidual level.
12 We n dy G . Smo o t h
Intersectionality scholarship has emerged as one of the most

significant areas of research across academic disciplines. It has
been considered “the most important theoretical contribution
that women’s studies in conjunction with related fields has made
so far” (McCall, 2005, 1771). It has opened a plethora of new
and exciting research questions and analyses. Viewing the world
from the intersections of various social locations, including race,
gender, class, ability, nationality, sexuality, among other locations,
has produced an important paradigm shift in terms of how we
study and approach questions of hierarchy, inequality, power, and
what constitutes the just society. As Berger and Guidroz (2010,
7) argue, intersectionality represents a new “social literacy” that
challenges traditional framing of research questions and meth-
odology. Speaking to the reach of this new social literacy, they
assert that to be “an informed social theorist or methodologist
in many fields of scholarly inquiry, but most especially in women’s
studies, one must grapple with the implications of intersectional-
ity.” (Ibid.)
In this chapter, I focus largely on the developments of intersec-
tionality from a Western, predominately US, perspective. However,
as intersectionality is at its core concerned with questions of power
and inequities, this discussion is applicable to wider political con-
texts. In fact, as more scholars engage intersectionality in their
work in non-Western contexts, under differing political regimes,
power hierarchies, and varied historical understandings of how dif-
ference is constituted, we are able to further our collective under-
standings of power and the role that institutions play in giving
meaning to identities. Not all claims of intersectionality theory as
constituted through a Western, specifically US, lens are applicable
to non-Western, non-US contexts. As I show here, this perspec-
tive reflects particular power hierarchies predominantly, though
not exclusively around race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability.
Social categories do not carry the same meaning across contexts
and systems of oppression operate differently according to the
context. While race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability have been
central to intersectionality approaches in the United States, these
same categories may be less salient in other contexts where citizen-
ship, language, and region may structure the formation of social
hierarchies.2 For example, Anil Al-Rebholz in this volume illus-
trates the salience of religion and culture as categories of analysis,
Th e or e t ic a l F r a m e w or k t o P ol ic y I n t e r v e n t ion 13
while race is less a determinant of social hierarchies in the lives of

women in Turkey.
As intersectionality is used to understand power hierarchies in
spaces outside the United States, the categories of analysis must
change as well. However, as intersectionality travels, some elements
are so fundamental that without these elements intersectionality
becomes unrecognizable and incapable of doing the political work
it was designed to do. Kimberle Crenshaw, who is credited with
naming the concept of intersectionality, has remarked that inter-
sectionality often appears as a traveler who shows up at a destina-
tion without her luggage (Crenshaw, 2011). As it has traveled it is
often stripped of the very elements that made it a critical theory
with a social justice imperative. One of my goals in this chapter
is to connect intersectionality back to its origins and in doing so
equip it for future travels. This volume attests that while the cat-
egories of analysis may alter based on the political context under
study, core elements of understanding engagements with power
remain salient. As scholars around the world continue to contrib-
ute to the development of intersectionality as a research paradigm,
we are able to develop greater specificity regarding the processes by
which groups are privileged and marginalized in societies.
I begin this chapter by first offering a brief genealogy of inter-
sectionality locating its origins with black feminist scholars and
activists. Next, I assert a set of general principles reflected in
articulations of intersectionality, noting the shifting terrain of
intersectionality scholarship. Since intersectionality scholarship
is understood widely as under development, I pose the question,
“What do social scientists, such as political scientists and others
interested in institutions and institutional processes, offer to the
further development of the intersectionality paradigm?” Using my
own work as an example of deploying intersectionality in the study
of political institutions, I situate the types of questions political
science illuminates in relation to intersectionality. I also recognize
that the tensions that make intersectionality attractive to so many,
may limit its advancement within political science and other social
science disciplines. The paradox for social science researchers is
that intersectionality exists as both a highly structured theoretical
framework, yet a loosely configured research paradigm. An over-
emphasis on this concern, as I argue at the close of the chapter,
could derail the potential advocacy and policy work scholars are
poised to do in an attempt to address inequality across identity

categories.
Those of us who study the manifestations of power through
societies’ political institutions are well positioned to push the
development of intersectionality toward even greater attentiveness
to the structures and institutions that give meaning to politicized
identities. The legal apparatuses articulated through policies, con-
ventions, resolutions, and institutions give individual subjects
meaning by at times extending, and at others resending, rights.
As well, these institutions and structures bound, direct, and
order individual and group choices. These apparatuses configure
prominently in determining the material consequences for indi-
viduals and condition how individuals articulate their identities.
Ultimately, applying such structural analyses to intersectional-
ity moves toward an expanded notion of what constitutes “iden-
tity politics.” Such a focus on structures and institutions does
the political work of troubling essentialized notions of identity
and interrogates the idea of naturalized categories with distinct
boundaries by understanding identity as evolving as institutions
(i.e., laws, policies, and conventions) shift and change. In addition,
this focus allows the foregrounding of the material consequences
and implications of identity categorizations on individual life cir-
cumstances and group politics. Understanding the internal logic
and organizational patterns of the structures and institutions that
dictate and enforce identity hierarchies, I argue, is a critical step
toward reconfiguring the effects of these structures and their role
in determining individual and group circumstances.
The chapters in this volume are representative of the work
political scientists and others interested in the study of institutions
are contributing to deepening our understandings of how institu-
tions and political structures give meaning to identities and struc-
ture the relationships between social identity groups. The focus on
institutions and institutional behavior allows us to add clarity to
the conversation on the processes by which multiple identities are
constituted and how the salience of identity categorizations shift
and evolve over time as they interact with political institutions,
structures, and movements. In honing political scientists’ contri-
bution to this ongoing conversation in this way, I do not mean
to undermine or limit the study of intersectionality at the ana-
lytical levels of individual subjective experience, cultural discourse,
and representation for political scientists.3 Indeed, these are all

relevant levels of analysis for intersectionality research and illu-
minate important aspects of how identity categories intersect and
how social divisions are constructed and maintained (Yuval-Davis,
2006). However, in light of the specific claims and values of politi-
cal science as a discipline, we are positioned uniquely to advance
thinking about the role of institutions and structures in defining
and maintaining identity categories.
In other writings, I have made the case for political science and
policy studies more fully adopting intersectionality as a research
paradigm and how intersectionality contributes to the study of
politics and policy analysis (Smooth, 2006, 2011). Here, I adopt
a different approach, reflecting on what political science and
policy studies offer to further develop the intersectional approach.
Beyond, how do we situate intersectionality in the study of politics
and policy, the question I explore in this piece is, “What specifi-
cally can political science and policy studies contribute to the study
of intersectionality as a research paradigm that crosses disciplinary
locations?” In other words, “What tools of analysis do we offer
to the development of intersectionality as a research paradigm?”
As well, I consider the importance of political science and policy
scholars well versed in intersectionality and policy, structures, and
institutions to the emerging policy debates that seek to utilize
intersectionality.
Intersectionality and the Politics of

Origin Stories
Origin stories are important in terms of locating a historical tra-
jectory and are equally important to determining what remains at
stake in our politically engaged scholarship. Therefore, I find it
critically important to locate intersectionality’s origins in struggles
for inclusion that mark the experiences of those who first gave
academic voice to the concept: black feminist theorists and activ-
ists. Intersectionality stems from investments in societal transfor-
mation, inclusion, and challenges to the status quo; therefore, in
starting with this origin story I strive to maintain its critiques of
durable hierarchies and privileges.
Retaining this understanding of intersectionality’s origin is
especially critical as it moves across disciplinary locations and
expands from its roots in black feminist theory to function as a

theoretical paradigm that may or may not center on negotiations
of race and gender hierarchies. With this expansion, it becomes
easy to separate intersectionality from its roots in black feminist
theory, thereby erasing the intellectual contributions of black fem-
inist scholars and more so their commitments to dismantling race
and gender hierarchies.
As intersectionality has grown into an academic “buzzword”
(Davis, 2008), it has come to operate as shorthand verbiage used
to signify a host of meanings. In its status as the current “it”
theory, it takes on assumptions and connotations that move away
from its foundation. It has also become all too easy to gesture
to intersectionality as a means of mentioning interrogations with
difference and power hierarchies without substantively taking up
the demands of intersectional analysis. As Knapp (2005) argues,
it allows scholars to use the terminology and gesture to inclu-
sion, while continuing to pursue research in ways that do not
substantively challenge the status quo. Stephanie Shields (2008)
illustrates this tendency through the use of what she refers to as
the “self-excusing,” often apologetic disclosure paragraph authors
may include in their work. In this ceremonious paragraph, authors
acknowledge the importance of intersectionality, yet absolve
themselves from actually substantively including such analyses in
their work (Shields, 2008, 305). In this way, scholars are cred-
ited with recognizing the significance of such an analysis and are
credited with being politically and intellectually relevant, but their
refusal to participate in developing the concept through empirical
and theoretical analysis contributes to a stagnating process. Such
treatments transform intersectionality into a signifying keyword.
Keywords, as Fraser and Gordon (1994) assert, assume a taken-
for-granted common-sense status that elide critical reflection. In
the wake of becoming academic cache, we can too easily take for
granted the historical roots of intersectionality and the politicized
struggles associated with the term.
My locating and centering the origin story of intersectional-
ity with black feminist intellectuals also represents an attempt to
return attention to intersectionality’s critical stance on uncovering
the operation of power and privilege that render individuals and
groups marginalized. This stands in contrast to deployments of
intersectionality that explore how power is most familiar, or explore
the compounded privileges of the powerful.4 Intersectionality can

tell us much about the ways in which intersections of privilege col-
lide to produce greater privilege. For example, a white, Western,
middle-classed, heterosexual, able-bodied man presents interlock-
ing social identities that help to explain how he experiences the
political world. Intersectionality theory is capable of shedding
light on his experiences, identities, and the resulting compounded
privileges. However, I maintain that intersectionality is most use-
ful not when it is used to explore how power is most familiar,
but when intersectionality offers us a means to make visible hid-
den power differentials that are naturalized through systems of
inequality, or when it helps researchers disrupt dominate narra-
tives of privilege. In such projects, intersectionality is aligned more
closely with its origins and does the political work of unraveling
oppressive systems of power.
A B rief Genealogy of Intersectionality

While critical race legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw is credited
with coining the term intersectionality in her writings on black
women’s experiences with employment discrimination (1989) and
domestic violence (1991), scholars including Crenshaw acknow-
ledge the foundations of intersectionality as emerging much earlier
in the works of early black feminist intellectuals. Around the same
time of Crenshaw’s writings, scholarship reflecting upon oneself
as belonging to multiple identity groups and understanding that
identity as a qualitatively different experience was developing also
beyond the United States (see, for example, Anthias and Yuval-
Davis, 1992).
Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” as a meta-
phor to explain the ways in which black women under the US
legal system are often caught between multiple systems of oppres-
sion marked by race, gender, and economic hierarchies without
being recognized for their unique experiences at the convergence
of these systems.5 Focusing on employment discrimination cases,
Crenshaw argues that dominant conceptualizations of discrimina-
tion under the law rely on determining discrimination using only
a single axis framework.
Using court cases brought forth by black women, Crenshaw illus-
trates a repeated pattern in which black women are protected under
discrimination laws only to the extent in which their experiences

align with either white women or black men (Crenshaw, 1989, 143).
Racial discrimination cases are thus determined by the experiences
of black men, and, in sex discrimination cases, the experiences of
white women are privileged. As Crenshaw shows, the courts have
a history of failing to account for the lives of black women who
experience the effects of discrimination injuries on the basis of both
race and gender. As well, Crenshaw argues that discrimination law
discredited black women as suitable representatives in cases of race
or sex discrimination because in either context their “hybrid” iden-
tity precluded them from serving as “pure” representatives of either
claim (Crenshaw, 1989, 145). In fact, their claims of belonging to
both groups have been treated as a compounded discrimination
that reaches beyond the intent of antidiscrimination law.
Crenshaw argues that the single axis framework articulated by
the courts limits claims of discrimination as emanating from a
discrete source of discrimination race or sex but not accounting
for the experiences of those who are “mutually burdened.” The
intersectional metaphor is explained:
Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and

going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an
intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another.
If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars
traveling from any number of directions, and sometimes, from all
of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the
intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race
discrimination. (Crenshaw, 1989, 149)
It is through this analysis of discrimination law that Crenshaw

sets the parameters of the intersectionality framework. In discuss-
ing the responses of the courts, she argues that the simultane-
ous experience of race and sex discrimination render black women
invisible by the courts. Similarly, women of color were rendered
invisible through the early discursive practices of both feminist
and critical race theory. While Crenshaw bases her discussion of
intersectionality on the experiences of black women, scholars later
extended her discussion to focus on the ways in which single-issue
frameworks fail to adequately capture the experiences of a myriad
of groups in society that experience marginalization along mul-
tiple axes of power.
Writing in the late 1980s, Crenshaw’s work is a continuance of

women of color’s writings that reflect dissatisfaction with treat-
ments of women of color’s activism, writings, and lived experiences.
Numerous scholars argue that women of color’s contributions
were suppressed through failures to recognize the convergence of
identity categories or systems of oppression. The Combahee River
Collective (1982 [1977]), Anzuldua (1987), Dill (1983), Moraga
and Anzuldua (1984), King (1988), and Mohanty (1988), all pro-
duced pivotal writings during this period that shared in disrupting
notions that the category “woman” denotes a universal, homoge-
neous experience. Instead, these authors asserted that race, class,
and sexuality distinguish women’s behavior and experiences.
These writings represent a continuance of feminist scholars of
color articulating the multiplicities of their identities and the politi-
cal consequences of multiple constituted identities. For centuries,
women of color have articulated the conundrum that the term inter-
sectionality represents and have articulated both a scholarly and
activist tradition emanating from their social location in US society.
Nineteenth-century African American scholar-activist Anna Julia
Cooper recognized the unique position of African American women
at the nexus of struggles for racial and gender equality. Cooper argued
that the progress of African Americans rested upon the abilities of
African American women to advance. She eloquently articulates that
it is “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my
womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patron-
age, then and there the whole . . . race enters with me” (Cooper, 1892,
31). Cooper’s words were similar to other activist women of color
such as Sojurner Truth and Ida B. Wells who also articulated the
unique positioning of African American women. Later, groups such
as the Combahee River Collective, a cadre of black lesbian feminist
activists writing in the 1970s, articulated the simultaneous effects
poised by race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Across social movements, women of color argued for a politics
of inclusion that recognized the legitimacy of their claims based
upon their needs as women of color. Many authors recognize the
linkages of intersectionality to the developments in black feminist
theory. Evelyn Simien (2006) situates intersectionality as growing
from black women’s lived experience and argues that such theoriz-
ing developed as a pragmatic response to their life circumstances.
Black feminist theory remains an important theoretical home for
the study of intersectionality, though more contemporary discus-

sions of intersectionality advocate for moving away from thinking
of intersectionality as a framework solely explaining the experi-
ences of women of color to thinking in terms of how intersection-
ality offers more robust understandings of power differentials that
exist among various groups in society (Hancock, 2007a).
As intersectionality developed, and in its earliest theorizing and
application, most scholars focused on the triumvirate of oppres-
sion: race, class, and gender. These three social identities and sys-
tems of power were given primacy in light of the ways systems
of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and class oppres-
sion work in tandem to situate women of color, particularly in US
society. However, as intersectionality has evolved, there is greater
emphasis on the systems and processes that operate in tandem to
produce various inequalities and privileges. Several chapters in this
volume do this work. For example, Miles engages intersectional-
ity as a framework to interrogate state-administered identification
practices that protect state interests in maintaining a gender binary
while the trans community in Chile must live between legal and
lived identities that as Miles argues, “renders everyday interaction
a complex, distressing and destabilizing process” (67). Miles and
contributors to this volume are not only mobilizing intersectional-
ity scholarship beyond the parameters of the United States where
different systems map the basis for discrimination and inequality,
but they are also placing an important emphasis on the institutions,
processes, and systems that undergird systems of inequality.
Principles of Intersectionality
Intersectionality’s substantial popularity is driven partially by its
appeal to progressive politics exercising a practice of inclusionary
politics in which marginalized groups are given voice. With the
great acclaim that surrounds intersectionality, there is still much
dissent surrounding its boundaries. Scholars from across disciplin-
ary locations are engaging in further developing intersectionality
by asserting new definitions, new levels of analysis, and arguing
the most appropriate methodologies to capture the theoretical
assertions of intersectionality. Intersectionality presents as in flux
with limited distinctive boundaries, which is both inviting and
problematic for scholars.
Here, I present some general premises of intersectionality as

an evolving paradigm and then reflect on each in more detail.
In doing so, I fully recognize that intersectionality continues to
develop across disciplinary spaces; its elements are under constant
negotiation and revision. Nevertheless, these principles are start-
ing points to understanding this dynamic and complex frame-
work. At its core foundations, intersectionality is concerned with
the following:
1. Resisting additive models that treat categories of social identity as

additive, parallel categories and instead theorizes these categories as
intersecting;
2. Antiessentialism and insists upon variation within categories of
social identity;
3. Recognition that social identity categories and the power systems that
give them meaning shift across time and geographical location;
4. Embracing the coexistence of privilege and marginalization acknowl-
edging that they are not mutually exclusive;
5. Changing the conditions of society such that categories of identity are
not permanently linked to sustained inequalities in efforts to build a
more just world.
1. Resisting Additive Models and Parallel Categories

Intersectionality has encouraged scholars to move away from mod-
els that situate categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality
as a singular axis of power. This framework staunchly resists an
understanding of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability as parallel
categories. Instead, what intersectionality encourages us to do is to
understand the ways in which these categories are not simply par-
allel but intersecting categories. Intersectionality posits that race,
class, gender, sexuality, ability, and various aspects of identity are
constitutive. Each informs the other and taken together, they pro-
duce a way of experiencing the world as sometimes oppressed and
marginalized and sometimes privileged and advantaged depend-
ing on the context.
Intersectionality requires that we pay close attention to the par-
ticulars of categories of social identity. As many have argued, it is
not enough to simply “add race and stir” to include perspectives of
women of color. Intersectionality requires that we recognize that
systems of oppression and hierarchy are neither interchangeable
nor are they identical; therefore, much is made of understanding

the ways that these categories function. These social categories
have differing organizing logics in that race works differently than
gender, class, or sexuality. Power associated with these categories
is neither configured in the same ways nor do they share the same
histories therefore, they cannot be treated identically (Phoenix
and Pattynama, 2006).
2. Antiessentialism and Diversity within Categories

Intersectionality takes into account that there is great variation
within categories of social identity. Understanding social identities
as mutually constitutive produces an array of ways of experiencing
blackness, working class, or sex and sexuality. This encourages us
to move away from essentializing or reducing experiences to “the
Latino experience” or “the lesbian experience” and allows for mul-
tiple ways of experiencing these social categories as they link and are
informed by other categories. Cathy Cohen (1999) argues that in
doing so, we avoid producing secondary marginalization in which
issues are defined based upon the needs of the more privileged of a
group and not in the interests of those who are impacted by mul-
tiple systems of oppression or even less valued systems of oppres-
sion by particular communities. This reduces the lure to privilege
one aspect of a person’s identity at the expense of other aspects. In
Affirmative Advocacy, Dara Strolovich (2007) shows how this sec-
ondary marginalization process happens among advocacy groups
that purport to represent complex identities often marginalized in
US politics. She finds that despite claims of representing the totality
of their group, advocates representing marginalized groups seldom
represent their constituents who are intersectionally marginalized,
even among the most well-intentioned groups.
3. Power as Shifting and Changing

While intersectionality places great emphasis on understanding
the means by which power is configured, it also establishes power
as dynamic and shifting rather than static and fixed. As such, we
cannot conclude that power operates in the same ways across con-
texts of time and location. Sociopolitical and economic histories
figure prominently into adequately defining the power relations
intersectionality seeks to make visible.
Depending upon the context, those who are marginalized and

those who have power differ. Therefore, we cannot evaluate oppres-
sion and marginalization without a sense of history as well as the
social, political, and economic opportunities available to various
groups across history. Categories are not fixed and change over
time. Their social and political meanings often change in different
historical contexts, and are contested and restructured both at the
level of the individual (what it means to me and my experiences)
and at the societal level (what it means to society and social sys-
tems) (Yuval-Davis, 2006). The significance of geographical loca-
tion to transforming the relationships between categories as well as
within categories has grown as intersectionality travels across disci-
plinary locations and into transnational conversations. The systems
of power that dictate whether that social identity is a marker of
privilege or marginalization also changes according to geographi-
cal location and configurations of power in that society.
4. Privilege and Marginalization

Privilege and marginalization are central to studies of intersec-
tionality. While many might assume that these two categories are
mutually exclusive, intersectionality scholarship has focused on
their coexistence. One can experience oppression along one axis
and privilege along another. Intersectionality focuses on power
across categories and in relation to one another understanding that
power is not equal across categories. Patricia Hill Collins (1990)
situates race, class, and gender as interlocking systems that create
an overarching “matrix of domination” in which actors can not
only be victimized by power but can also exercise power over oth-
ers. Collins highlights the contradictory nature of oppression sug-
gesting that few “pure victims” or “pure oppressors” exist. Penalty
and privilege are distributed among individuals and groups within
the matrix of domination such that none are marked exclusively by
one or the other.
5. Changing Conditions
Julia Jordan-Zachery (2007) reminds us that from the earliest con-
ceptualizations of intersectionality, embedded in the theory is a lib-
eratory agency possessed by those experiencing the effects of life at
the intersection. The imperative to change existing conditions and

take action from their location at the intersection toward impact-
ing the lives of those both within and between social identity cat-
egories is an important theme woven throughout. So as much as
researchers categorize intersectionality as a descriptive framework
or research paradigm, it is very much a political concept grounded
in an emancipatory politics with social justice-based outcomes as
the goal. Intersectionality is understood as rooted in efforts to
change societal conditions that create and maintain oppressive
power hierarchies. In addition to recognizing the differences that
exist among individuals and groups, intersectionality is invested
in modes of institutional change designed to remedy the effects of
inequalities produced by interlocking systems of oppression.
In summary, the version of intersectionality to which I subscribe
is informed by a plethora of scholarly thinking on the parameters
of intersectionality. It can apply to everyone, as we all have a race,
gender, sexuality, and social class, whether we experience our social
locations as inequalities or privileges. However, intersectionality is
at its best when used to uncover patterns of privilege and marginal-
ization as opposed to focus on familiar understandings of privilege.
Our social locations are not fixed such that we are construed per-
manently as oppressors or the oppressed.6 Intersectionality is con-
text specific; structural and dynamic (Weldon, 2006). The relevant
axes of power for investigation are determined by the situation and
site under study. As Hancock (2007a) surmises, the intersectional
approach “changes the relationship between the categories of inves-
tigation from one that is determined a priori to one of empirical
investigation” (2007a, 67). It asserts that categories are relevant
and have an impact on understanding material lives and at the same
time it is interested in disrupting the impetus to render categories
as fixed and mutually exclusive. Intersectionality offers a means
to contest the power arrangements between categories and even
embraces and envisions a futuristic intellectual politics in which
categories are stripped of any deterministic powers.7
Intersectionality, Agency, Institutions,

and Institutional Processes
So, what does political science and other fields that center on insti-
tutions, institutional processes, and structures contribute to the
ongoing development of intersectionality as a research paradigm?

Such disciplines as political science can help intersectionality
studies gain greater balance between the individual and structural
levels of analysis. By virtue of intersectionality’s development as
a response to the law’s treatment of individuals, it is borne out
of a politics of recognition. As such, it demands that the law
recognize the ways in which individuals’ multiple identities mat-
ter to their treatment. While the law necessitates this focus on
the individual, intersectionality theorists have pushed against the
reliance on the individual as the fundamental level of analysis for
intersectional analyses (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Conaghan, 2009).
With such an approach, the structures, institutions, processes,
and systems that generate and mediate the experiences of indi-
viduals are elided in favor of a focus on the individual or particu-
lar groups.
The potential contributions of political scientists to the study of
intersectionality lie precisely in illuminating the structural effects
and the processes by which institutions contribute to identity con-
structions and mobilizations. In her discussion of the salience of
structure to intersectionality, political scientist S. Laurel Weldon
aggressively situates structural analysis as the core of intersec-
tionality offering that the focus on identity itself is a misguided
understanding of intersectionality. She argues, “It is not often rec-
ognized that structural analysis is required by the idea of intersec-
tionality. It is the intersection of social structures, not identities,
to which the concept refers. We cannot conceptualize ‘interstices’
unless we have a concept of the structures that intersect to create
these points of interaction” (Weldon, 2006, 239). Such consider-
ations of structure necessitate a focus on institutions and institu-
tional processes, necessitating engagements with the law, public
policy, and governing bodies.
Rather than advocate the primacy of one level over the other,
I am arguing that intersectionality scholarship has gone so far in
the direction of centering its analysis at the level of the individual
and the individual’s agency that it overlooks the powerful role of
institutions and structures in mediating the individual’s behavior
and structuring the range of available choices. It is from this per-
spective that I suggest political science’s contribution to intersec-
tionality as potentially restoring some balance and tempering the
explanatory value of individual agency in intersectional analysis.
To be clear, I do not draw the types of distinctions as Baukje

Prins (2006) does between an intersectionality grounded in struc-
tural analysis with subjects being constituted through static systems
of domination and marginalization and a constructionist version of
intersectionality in which the subject is understood as the primary
factor determining identity. For Prins, the constructionists approach
treats identity as more a point of narration in which the subject is
“both actor in and co-author of our own life story” (2006, 281) and
understands the individual’s identity as a matter of choice and as
constituted through the individual’s “own acting and thinking”
(2006, 280). In contrasts, she interprets the structural approach to
treat identity as a matter of recognition, naming, and categorization
that is predetermined by systems of domination and profoundly sta-
ble and predictable. Such a constructionist vision of intersectionality
is deeply invested in the power of individual agency. The emphasis
on the subject’s free will to become a subject by their own determi-
nation, on their own terms, dismisses the myriad of ways that the
“isms” (racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism) interplay with
the subject’s possibilities. More so, it reflects a failure to understand
the ever-evolving processes of institutions and structures. Far from
static, institutions are shifting constantly, but with particular goals
in mind—to protect the values of the institution, ensure its survival,
and extend its values and ideas of appropriateness.
A more integrated vision of intersectionality that articulates
roles for both the structure and the individual offers a closer
approximation social reality. Understanding institutions and struc-
tures not as static and overly deterministic but as evolving often
in relation to the resistance politics and strategies of intersectional
actors, reflects the complex relationship between individual and
structural levels of analysis. Resistance strategies are understood
in larger contexts of institutional processes and historical events
that can facilitate as well as curtail opportunities for changing cat-
egorizations and dismantling dominant frameworks. Such an inte-
grated model appreciates the weight of institutional and structural
forces as well as the transformative potential of resistance strategies
employed by intersectional actors.
Intersectionality, particularly as it interfaces with other politi-
cal projects that uplift individual agency, threatens a move toward
suppressing the role that institutions and structures play in modi-
fying individual behavior and ordering choices. Such approaches to
intersectionality theorizing overstate the agency of individuals and

their freedom to act independently with the power to shape their
own political understanding of their identities. As Gill Valentine
(2007) concurs, “the existing theorization of the concept of inter-
sectionality overemphasizes the abilities of individuals to actively
produce their own lives and underestimates how the ability to enact
some identities or realities rather than others is highly contingent
on the power-laden spaces in and through which our experiences
are lived” (2007, 19).
Political scientists and others who focus on institutions such
as the law, public policy, governing bodies, and social move-
ments understand that individual agency is subject to and enacted
within institutions and as such is always bounded and beholden to
strong institutional forces that can render groups visible or invis-
ible, beneficiaries or pariahs, in relation to the state. Advancing
an appreciation for the role of institutions in relation to individual
agency allows us to engage more fully with the political and mate-
rial implications of multiply constituted identities, the institutional
processes by which identities are made meaningful, as well as the
conditions under which institutions offer to recognize identities as
multiply constituted.
For an example of this kind of research approach, I turn to
my own work on US state legislatures to reflect on how an atten-
tiveness to intersectionality produces new insights on institutional
processes that are unavailable through a focus on either dominant
groups or through the focus on a singular axis—race or gender. As
well, I seek to show the ways political science scholarship can con-
tribute to extending intersectionality’s reach beyond traditional
identity politics.
By examining the legislative experiences of African American
women, I explore the effects of race and gender on the meanings
of legislative power and influence. Dominant understandings and
narratives of legislative power are disrupted when viewed from an
intersectionality perspective, which highlights the way in which
legislative power is a deeply gendered and racialized construct.
Race and gender impact the paths to power and influence avail-
able to legislators, as well as the types of influence they are even
afforded in the eyes of their colleagues.
These are critical concerns as US state legislatures have
become increasingly diverse. The key questions are: How are these
institutions incorporating women and men of color and white

women—all relative newcomers to these lawmaking bodies? How
are the traditional politics of these institutions changing in light
of a more diverse group of legislators? I focus on the experiences of
African American women legislators, but the goal is not simply to
document their experiences as African American women, though
admittedly that would indeed be a contribution given the sparse
research on the experiences of women of color in US electoral
politics. The questions engendered from this research center on
how institutions respond to difference: How do race and gender
interact with commonly held assumptions about institutions and
legislative behavior? Does race and gender impact the power that
is commonly understood to emanate from holding positions in the
legislative leadership, having seniority, and high levels of legislative
activity? What happens when African American women legislators
occupy the leadership positions or have the legislative attributes
that traditionally confer power and influence? Are these institu-
tional norms gendered and racialized?
The effects of race and gender on legislative power arrangements
are substantial. The formal leadership structure is evidence of race
and gender hierarchies in the legislature. Few African American
women hold the top leadership positions or chair the powerful
committees that are commonly associated with increasing a legis-
lator’s influence. Their exclusion from these leadership posts only
partially accounts for their more limited influence among their
colleagues. The challenge for African American women legisla-
tors is more complex than gaining access to legislative leadership
positions. Their limited access to legislative power is complicated
by their exclusion from informal power structures that exist in
the legislature. African American women who hold positions in
the formal leadership repeatedly report that they are not included
among the inner circle of confidents hand selected by top party
leaders, even though their positions suggest they would have access
to these inner circles. This exclusion precludes them from partici-
pating in critical policy discussions that impact their constituents.
Such informal circles of power become a parallel power structure
that contests the power of the official party leadership structure
and undermines the power of some formal leaders.
Even when African American women legislators occupy the same
political spaces, share similar positions, and political titles, they are
regarded differently by their colleagues. Influence that would have

otherwise been associated with individual legislators in alignment
with traditional institutional norms regarding the power of lead-
ership positions is not equally conferred upon African American
women. What it means to be a party leader or a committee chair
is mediated by the legislator’s race and gender. These traditionally
powerful positions neither hold the same meaning nor do they
lead to the same outcomes for African American women. African
American women’s legislative performances are bounded by such
deeply racialized and gendered institutional processes and struc-
tures in the legislature.
My findings, along with other scholars working on race and
gender in legislative institutions, are showing how gender and
race problematize even the most stable categories such as party
leader and committee chair.8 What it means to hold these posi-
tions and the outcomes these positions produce differ when
African American women occupy these positions. These stable cat-
egories are transformed by race and gender, producing outcomes
that are, as Crenshaw argues, “qualitatively different” (Crenshaw,
1991, 1245). Gender and race are not merely identity categories,
but act as mediating forces that serve to limit avenues that would
lead traditionally to institutional influence. The gender and race
hierarchies prevalent in US society more broadly compete with
well-established norms of legislative behavior. Adherence to these
power arrangements ultimately impact policy outcomes and raise
questions on the quality of representation, particularly for com-
munities of color. When traditional paths to power and influence
are either unavailable to them or fail to yield the desired outcomes,
African American women are forced to devise alternative strategies
to remain relevant and effective representatives on behalf of their
constituents.
If we were to employ only an individual level of analysis, focused
on evaluating individual African American women’s effectiveness,
we miss the institutional norms and characteristics that structure
legislative behavior. African American women’s individual agency
is intertwined with the formal and informal structures and pro-
cesses that render some legislators influential and others less so,
much on the basis of race and gender preferences and hierarchies.
The presence of African American women in state legislatures
challenges and expands our understandings of legislative norms
and behavior. Centering their experiences counters previous stud-

ies that constructed narratives of institutional power relying solely
on the experiences of white men, the dominant majority group
in US state legislatures. Through examining African American
women lawmakers’ location within the legislative institution, we
have new understandings of how power is constituted in the leg-
islature. When we assume an intersectional vantage point that
embodies both the individual and structural levels of analysis, it
teaches us more regarding the full workings of institutions and
forces us to reexamine traditional understandings of institutional
norms, processes, and behaviors.
Unresolved Tensions
Although intersectionality presents as an exciting, groundbreaking
theoretical framework and emerging research paradigm, several
issues remain unresolved and can stymie the progress of intersec-
tionality in political science and other social science disciplines.
For scholars interested in applying intersectionality to empirical
projects, a number of tensions emerge around methodological
issues. Notably, as Kathy Davis (2008) details, the very elements
of intersectionality that make it so attractive to scholars across dis-
ciplinary locations are the very issues that also make it contentious.
Intersectionality lacks a clear, concise definition; it lacks param-
eters; it does not specify which categories should be theorized as
intersecting; the relationship between the categories; how many
categories can be included; and when to stop adding categories of
analysis. There are no established hard and fast rules about when
intersectionality should and should not be applied and there is
no methodology associated with it. All the elements that make
it attractive to scholars across disciplines also make for an uneasy
alliance with political science and other social sciences given the
dominant methodological strands in these disciplines.
These issues all reflect methodological concerns that are par-
ticularly salient for social scientists. However, we might question
why these concerns move to the center when previously mar-
ginalized voices and issues are gaining traction in the academy.9
Nevertheless, intersectionality scholars are responding to these
critiques and tensions. Two issues have dominated social scientists’
concerns and have limited their engagement with intersectionality.
The first issue is the uneasiness with identifying which are the
appropriate categories for analysis to constitute an intersectional
approach and second the quantitative methodological biases that
currently dominate many social sciences and encourage schol-
ars to become consumed with appropriate statistical models that
might accurately reflect the theoretical concept of intersectional-
ity. While these research considerations have their place, becoming
mired in these debates detracts from opportunities to address the
very systems of inequality that intersectionality illuminates. As the
chapters in this volume attests, across geographic spaces the politi-
cal moment is ripe for engaging policy frameworks that reflect
intersectional solutions; however with scholars of intersectionality
focused elsewhere there is a risk missing the possibilities of this
policy window.
The dominant paradigms of political science methodology sit
in opposition to the concerns of intersectionality as I have defined
it. One of the most significant barriers to the advancement of
intersectionality within political science and other social science
disciplines is the appropriate methodological modeling of intersec-
tionality (Hancock, 2007a, 2007b; Simien, 2006, 2007; Orey and
Smooth, 2006; Weldon, 2006). What is most familiar to political
scientists interested in speaking to the effects of race, gender, or
class is to employ an additive approach, particularly in quantita-
tive analyses. Political scientist Evelyn Simien (2007, 266) argues
that adding dichotomous variables to regression models and con-
trolling for their effects fail in relation to two aspects of intersec-
tionality theorizing. One, in treating variables as dichotomous, it
fails to capture the range of possibilities within each variable cat-
egory. For example, race is conceived as black or white and gender
is conceptualized in terms of men or women. So, it fails to capture
the simultaneous nature of identity that intersectionality asserts.
In other words, such methodological approaches fail to capture
the ways gender is racialized and race is gendered. Further, such
insistence on binaries limits opportunities to explore the fluidity
of sexual identity that scholars in this volume, particularly Miles,
Combs, Monro, and Richardson take up in relation to the state in
this volume. To extend Simien’s concerns, such quantitative meth-
odologies fail to take into account how categories such as race,
gender, sexual identity vary over time and across geographical
location. Overall, the existing approaches most familiar to political
scientists and other social scientists are not adept at capturing all
the ways that intersectionality seeks to move away from static,
essentialist understandings of categories.
Political scientists are not alone in raising such questions. In
a special issue of the journal Sex Roles, guest editor Stephanie
Shields writes:
Some social sciences have been more open to the transformative

effects of an intersectionality perspective than others. The intersec-
tionality perspective has had more impact in academic specializa-
tions already concerned with questions of power relations between
groups. Disciplines/specializations whose conventional method-
ologies embrace multidimensionality and the capacity to represent
complex and dynamic relationships among variables are more open
to the intersectionality perspective. (Shields, 2008, 302)
While Shields is most concerned with the field of psychology,

her assessment is quite applicable to political science and other
social sciences. Given the central concerns and values of political
science, particularly its emphasis on discerning the operations of
power in society, we might assume it to be ripe for intersectional
analyses. However, Shields’s fears for intersectionality’s advance-
ment in psychology parallel my own fears for its advancement in
political science. The realization of intersectionality’s potential is
at risk of succumbing to our preoccupations with what is cast as
the “methodological challenges” of intersectionality.
As much as political scientists can offer intersectionality, in
return, intersectionality can offer political science an expanded
appreciation for varied methodological tools and approaches.
Given the critical potential of political science voices to enhanc-
ing the development of intersectionality, it is useful to challenge
methodologists to become innovative in pursuit of strategies that
meet the demands of complexity that intersectionality requires.
To this end, Hancock (2007a) encourages an openness among
intersectionality scholars to the potential innovations that quan-
titative scholars working with large data sets can offer the study
of intersectionality. She cautions that true innovation will surface
when scholars engage in data collection techniques that more
fully account for the dynamism among and between categories
of identity (2007a, 66). She strikes an important balance between
eschewing quantitative analyses and locating intersectionality as
exclusively the purview of ethnographies and other qualitative

methodologies. The balance she encourages is most possible when
all methodological approaches available to intersectionality schol-
ars are valued equally. This necessitates confronting what I term
the “tyranny of the quantitative” in the discipline and creating
spaces for academic production open to the range of methods that
allow scholars to deeply engage the political context, suspend their
predetermined categorizations, and fully explore the relationships
between identity categories.
Seizing the Moment: Intersectionality and

Equity Policies
Resisting these methodological divides that stand to mire the
advancement of intersectionality is especially important at this
political moment. Political scientists and other scholars of policy,
institutions, and institutional processes are poised to make sub-
stantial contributions toward shaping the emerging policy debates
on intersectionality. Institutions of governance increasingly are
expressing interests in employing intersectionality as a tool in
policy making and, as I detail in this section, they benefit from
engagement with scholars well versed in intersectionality as well as
structures, institutions, and policy making.
National and international governing bodies including the
United Nations and the European Union are turning increas-
ingly to intersectionality approaches to articulate and develop
ideal responses to concerns for equality and a more sophisticated
awareness of diversities across and within identity groups. For
example, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination (CERD) embraces Crenshaw’s definition of
intersectionality to articulate the nature and processes of racism.
Squires (2008) identifies intersectionality debates emerging in the
creation of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission
(EHRC), noting the ways intersectionality is troubling the EHRC’s
approaches to inequality. The EHRC’s debates between addressing
inequalities along singular axis using multiple, yet separate equal-
ity laws versus more integrated approaches that address multiple
forms of inequality by constructing a single policy intervention are
debates that certainly reflect the essence of intersectionality’s con-
cerns. In response, intersectionality scholars are weighing in on
these state posed remedies to existing inequalities (Squires, 2008;

Yuval-Davis, 2006; Verloo, 2006; Lombardo and Verloo, 2009;
Raj, Bunch, and Nazombe, 2002; Bassel and Emejulu, 2010).
Verloo (2006) advises, and scholars in this volume confer,
that intersectionality scholars must carefully monitor and criti-
cally evaluate purported articulations of intersectionality masked
as equity policies. Taking the case of intersectionality and public
policies in Uruguay, Erica Townsend-Bell argues in this volume
that we must distinguish between policies aimed toward fostering
equity and inclusion and those calling for interventions that reflect
the principles of intersectionality. She points out that states are
becoming increasingly responsive to group claims and are design-
ing affirmative action programs and gender quotas, for example
as a means of addressing group claims. However, these remedies
address inequality only along a singular axis. Such policies fall
short of an intersectionality framework in that in addressing only
a singular aspect of difference they maintain the race or gender
approach. Rather than locate shortcomings with the state, instead
Townsend-Bell finds that advocacy groups in Uruguay seldom
frame issues as intersectional problems requiring intersectional
solutions. Townsend-Bell’s assessments make the connections
between the state’s actions on intersectionality and the work of
advocacy groups, pointing out the interconnectedness of the two.
However, as other scholars denote, advocacy and interest groups
too find it difficult and politically confining to deploy intersec-
tional frames in their work.
In studying US advocacy groups, Dara Strolovich’s (2007)
work further illustrates Townsend-Bell’s conclusions as Strolovich
makes the case that the political environment and nature of legal
frameworks limit advocacy groups’ embrace of intersectionality.
Advocacy groups that we might imagine as best situated to rep-
resent intersectional groups and their interests actually fail to do
so as these groups are organized to represent issues along a single
axis. US civil rights-based groups organized to advocate around
race issues, for example, find it difficult to advocate for intersec-
tional race issues focused on race and class (welfare reform debates
in the 1990s), race and gender (gender pay equity issues), or race
and sexuality (marriage equality). This reality, as Strolovich argues,
is not necessarily due to lack of will but more so because the politi-
cal environment seldom supports organizations addressing the
complexity of intersectional issues. A range of factors contribute

to an environment that works against intersectional representation
by advocacy groups from funding organizations casting advocacy
groups in narrow terms to legal provisions that fail to acknowledge
intersectional realities. Both Townsend-Bell and Strolovich’s work
illustrate the potential pitfalls of states adopting policies that focus
on a single axis of inequality masked as intersectional frameworks.
When states take such approaches, the status quo is maintained
and intersectional groups and their interests continue to go unrep-
resented. Moreover, their work demonstrates the need to have
intersectional policy advocates both inside and outside the state.
Scholars examining the deployment of intersectionality as a pol-
icy tool point to strong tendencies on the part of states to adopt
equity remedies organized around a singular axis such as gender
in the case of gender mainstreaming policies.10 In addition to the
arguments Strolovich and Townsend-Bell offer regarding advocacy
groups failing to adopt intersectional frameworks, fundamental
misunderstandings and misrepresentations of intersectionality also
contribute to the insistence on singular inclusion policies. Even
well-intentioned equity and inclusion policies fall short in that
they so often assume all inequalities share the same ontological
history and internal logic. In doing so, they violate the premises of
intersectionality. Such approaches to remedying inequality and fos-
tering inclusion ignore the historical and contextual realities that
race, gender, class, and sexual inequalities emanate from different
sources, produce different effects, and are understood as cocon-
stitutive. Equality policies that favor a single-strand approach to
equality reflect an assumption of virtual sameness among groups
and such assumptions run counter to the scholarship on intersec-
tionality, which asserts the varying historical roots and effects of
differing types of inequality (Squires, 2008; Verloo, 2006).
These efforts to build more robust equality-centered institu-
tions and structures using the framework of intersectionality are
confronting an array of challenges. As I have discussed throughout
this chapter, on some level these challenges are inherent to opera-
tionalizing the level of complexity that intersectionality demands
theoretically, and in part these challenges speak to the lack of
specificity associated with theoretical treatments of intersection-
ality. These challenges to using intersectionality are reflective of
deeply entrenched, institutionalized understandings of inequality
as existing along a singular axis. However, through studying struc-

tures such as the United Nations, legislatures and other governing
bodies, organized advocacy and interest groups, as well as gender
quotas with a focus on their internal logics and politics, we bet-
ter understand the process through which they advance or cur-
tail the adoption of intersectional policy frameworks. Combining
an understanding of the internal logics of institutions with an
understanding of the principles of intersectionality, we are better
positioned to construct institutions, structures, and policies that
actually increase equality and foster greater inclusion (Bassel and
Emejulu, 2010). From the earliest assessments of intersectional-
ity’s arrival in these policy discussions, it was clear that where the
voices of intersectionality scholars are absent, these debates easily
stagnate or worse revert to competitive struggles between identity
groups over limited resources (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Lombardo and
Verloo, 2009; Hancock, 2011).
The questions and debates raised in our scholarly discussions will
filter into these public policy windows of opportunity. Through
increased dialogue between scholars across geographic contexts in
forums such as this volume, we will be able to capitalize on the
political potential of the moment and move toward the creation of
public policies that more accurately reflect and address the ways
that individuals and groups experience equality and inequality.
This focus on the search for more equitable institutions and struc-
tures that bring recognition to those rendered invisible, those who
are in need of government redress for discrimination, is reflective
of intersectionality’s origins that sought to articulate a means of
social change that substantially challenged and transformed exist-
ing hierarchies. Those trained to study power situated in institu-
tions are equipped to seize upon this political moment.
Notes
1. I am grateful to the Shifting Agendas conference participants who
shared their thoughtful comments during my keynote address.
I am also grateful to Angelia Wilson for organizing the confer-
ence and offering sage advice and feedback on this chapter. I owe
a special thanks to my fall seminar students in “Operationalizing
Intersectionality” at The Ohio State University, as several ideas dis-
cussed here were refined during our intense debates during the semi-
nar. My thoughts on intersectionality are far more clear as a result
of our collective reading. Finally, elements of the sections on the

principles intersectionality and the genealogy of intersectionality are
detailed in W. Smooth, “Intersectionality and Women’s Leadership,”
in Gender and Women’s Leadership: A Sage Series Handbook, edited
by Karen O’Conner (New York: Sage Publications, 2010).
2. Which categories are to be included in intersectionality analyses is a
source of debate among scholars. From the onset of the terms’ usage,
the categories most interrogated in tandem were race, gender, and
to a lesser extent, class. However, as intersectionality scholarship has
evolved, categories taken as central to the intersectionality approach
have more often included sexuality and ability.
3. In fact, several treatments of the intersectional realities of African
American women’s political representation in policy debates are
illustrative of political scientists building linkages between cultural
representations and policy discourse. For example see Ange Marie
Hancock’s The Politics of Disgust (2004); Julia Jordan-Zachery’s
Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy (2008); and
Michele Tracey Berger’s Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of
Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS (2004).
4. For contrasting views on the deployment of intersectionality to study
privileged groups, see: Jessica Holden Sherwood “The View from
the Country Club: Wealthy Whites and the Matrix of Privilege,” in
The Intersectional Approach, edited by Berger, Michele Tracey, and
Kathleen Guidroz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2010).
5. In Crenshaw’s writings, she is clear that intersectionality does not
refer only to the categories of race and gender. See: “Mapping the
Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against
Women” in which she explicitly states that “the concept can and
should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orien-
tation, age, and color” (1991, 1245).
6. Jennifer Nash (2008) raises salient points regarding the coexistence
of power and privilege in intersectionality scholarship.
7. McCall (2005) offers a compelling framework for understanding the
range of ways intersectionality engages with categories and the range
of treatments present among intersectionality scholars.
8. Similar observations are discussed regarding African American
women serving in the US Congress. Mary Hawkesworth (2003)
details how processes of “race-gendering” impact African American
women’s positions in Congress and the ways the issues to which they
speak are marginalized precisely because of constructions of power
in relation to the intersecting constructions of race and gender.
9. As Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva argue in White Logic, White Methods:
Racism and Methodology (2008), prevailing notions of “white logic”
insist that in the Western imagination logic, reason, and objectivity

and the tools and methods through which they are exercised are the
sole purview of elite white men. Essentially, these methodological
questions are deployed precisely to maintain control over established
ways of knowing, who produces knowledge and who has a rightful
claim to knowledge production.
10. Emanuela Lombardo and Mieke Verloo (2009) offer a detailed
discussion of gender and gender mainstreaming as an entrenched
institutionalized policy system in Europe. They employ a thought
exercise that considers the possibilities of expanding (stretching to
use their language) the gender equality policy frame to be more
inclusive of different types of inequality. Across the EU states, gender
mainstreaming, after much feminist activism, is the familiar frame
for conceptualizing inequality, and many would argue it constitutes
a primary policy frame for understanding inequality. A challenge is
presented to this “gender as inequality” frame when activists and
scholars interested in policy frameworks that understand and pro-
cess inequalities from the perspective of intersectionality assert com-
peting frameworks that decenter gender as the primary inequality.
Lombardo and Verloo’s thought exercise forces us to consider what
happens when the primacy of gender is challenged with reconceptu-
alized equality policies.
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2
I n t e r sec t iona l A dva nc es?

I nc lusiona ry a n d I n t e r sec t iona l
Stat e Ac t ion i n Uruguay
Erica E. Townsend-Bell
This chapter addresses the question of whether states can act inter-
sectionally, and which social groups are most likely to push states
to do so. I focus on the Uruguayan case, where I find that such
action is limited to very specific instances that match the condi-
tions required for inclusionary action: strong civil society mobiliza-
tion, international pressure, party system change, and moderate- to
low-cost solutions, alongside one simple, but thus far underutilized
necessary condition for intersectional action: explicitly intersec-
tional demands. I find in this case study, that women of color are
more likely to engage in intersectional claims making and forward
intersectional demands, while traditional feminist groups are less
likely to do so.
Intersectionality is potentially at a crossroads. Whereas the basic
concept has been elaborated throughout the history of black femi-
nist thought, the specific term as introduced by Crenshaw is gain-
ing in popularity across the feminist spectrum, taking on distinct
nuances most appropriate to the particular contexts in which it is
deployed. Yet, as the term gains in popularity and appeal, there is
a special danger of the idea being appropriated, misinterpreted,
or misapplied. Kathy Davis’s (2008) coining of intersectionality
as a “buzzword” is an apt description of precisely this concern.
It is quite similar to the leveling effect that Rachel Luft (2009,
100) describes when she voices concern that “uniform deployment
may inadvertently contribute to flattening the very differences
44 E r ic a E . Tow ns e n d -Be l l
intersectional approaches intend to recognize.” This issue is raised

in other ways as well; for instance, scholars have questioned why
the race, class, gender trilogy is so frequently, and in some cases,
uncritically adopted as the most appropriate or most compre-
hensive frame for analyzing intersectionality (Dhamoon, 2009;
García-Bedolla, 2007; Grabham, 2009; Knapp, 2005; Nash, 2008;
Weldon, 2006).
Nonetheless, recently intersectionality theory is being taken up
by state and policy activists. This trend is perhaps most notable in
the European context, where the European Union has pushed a
more integrated approach for combating various forms of inequal-
ity. What remains at question is whether these new state attempts
are intersectionality per se, or something different. Indeed, a num-
ber of recent works have indicated skepticism about such prospects,
noting the shortcomings of policy and civil society attempts to
enact intersectionality (Bredström, 2006; Kantola and Nousiainen,
2009; Koldinská, 2009; Lewis, 2009; Lombardo and Verloo, 2009;
Luft and Ward, 2009; Manuel, 2007; Skjeie and Langvasbråten,
2009; Squires, 2008; Verloo, 2006).
These criticisms all converge around the central question of
what is and is not intersectional action and whether states can per-
form such action. Certainly it is the case that states are paying
more attention to difference, and evidence seems to indicate that
they are doing so in a manner that seeks to move beyond the nar-
row identity politics battles of previous decades. But what exactly
does that mean? Is attention to difference beyond simple identity
politics the same as intersectionality? That is, are states concerned
with the full eradication of social injustice and the fullest pos-
sible inclusion of the polity? Or are they more concerned with the
still laudable, but narrower, goal of simply ameliorating injustice
to some degree? Moreover, what are the conditions under which
states’ act might support intersectional action, what are the limits
of said action, and where is this activity occurring?
One place where these developments are occurring is Latin
America, a historic hotbed of class-based mobilization, and home
to increasing mobilization on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and
recently, sexuality, due in large part to pressures on states from
social movement activists, civil society groups, and international
actors concerned with gender, indigenous, and Afro-Latin inclu-
sion. As a result of these pressures, governments have begun to
I n t e r s e c t ion a l A dva nc e s? 45
respond with mechanisms for greater equality and inclusion in

the form of gender quotas, autonomy agreements, and affirma-
tive action initiatives, among other inclusionary but not necessar-
ily intersectional mechanisms. Uruguay is a space where numerous
gains for equality have been made in a short period of time, some
intersectional and some not. Thus this case allows us to address
the central concerns of whether states act intersectionally, and the
conditions under which they might do so. As I will argue, states
can act intersectionally, but often do not. In the Uruguayan case,
such action has been limited to very specific instances that match
the conditions required for inclusionary action: strong civil soci-
ety mobilization, international pressure, party system change, and
moderate- to low-cost solutions, alongside one simple, but under-
utilized necessary condition for intersectional action, explicitly
intersectional demands.
I ntersectional A dvances?
The period from 2005 to 2010 ushered in a time of significant
change in the Uruguayan political context. A new political coali-
tion, the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), entered national govern-
ment for the first time in 2005 with the stated intention of making
a series of changes in Uruguay. These changes included its largest
agenda item, an emergency antipoverty program designed to help
with the lingering effects of a severe 2002 economic crisis that had
left a significant amount of Uruguay’s children and other citizens
well below the poverty line. The Frente Amplio also took up a
number of other issues that had previously received little traction
in Uruguayan politics. In short order the parliament passed civil
union legislation, becoming the first Latin American country to
pass such a law at the national level (2007); legislation allowing
gay candidates to enter the military (2009); adoption rights for
same-sex partners in a formal civil union (2009); and legislation
allowing transsexuals to have a legal sex change (2009).
In the same time span the first Frente Amplio president,
Tabaré Vázquez, appointed Romero Rodr íguez, then president
of Organizaciones Mundo Afro (Black World Organizations;
OMA), the largest black civil rights organization in Uruguay,
as the first ever presidential advisor on racial equality. Similarly,
Carmen Beramendi, director of the National Institute of Women
(Inmujeres), selected Beatriz Ram írez, cofounder of OMA and

previous head of the Afro-Uruguayan Women’s Support Group
(GAMA), to form and head the newly created Secretariat for
Afro-Descendant Women. At the same time, Alicia García, also
a member of OMA and the then head of GAMA, entered the
Ministry of Housing, as an assessor overseeing the occupation
of a development of black female head of household apartments.
And finally, the Vázquez administration signed off on the first
Uruguayan gender quota law (2009), which takes effect for the
2014–2015 electoral cycle, and which requires that at least one
of every three candidates for national or departmental office be
a person of the opposite sex. Thus far the current Frente Amplio
administration of President José Mujica (2010–2015) has been
less active on issues of equality and inclusion, but given that many
of the changes noted above occurred toward the end of Vázquez’s
administration, whether that will remain the case is yet to be
seen. There has been some discussion of a debate on extending
quota legislation, although no bill has yet been introduced. Nor is
there a bill legalizing gay marriage. Although at the time of writ-
ing, gay marriage activists report they are working with members
of the legislature to introduce such a bill. There is a bill pend-
ing for the decriminalization of abortion, similar to legislation
that was vetoed by President Vázquez after achieving a majority
of votes in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate in 2008.
Finally, in continuation of changes made in the previous adminis-
tration, Beatriz Ramírez, the director of the Secretariat for Afro-
descendant Women, has been made the director of Inmujeres,
while Alicia Esquivel, an Afro-Uruguayan pediatrician, has been
named the head of the Secretariat for Afro-descendant Women
for the 2010–2015 period.
In sum, there have been numerous changes and advances for
equality in the six-year period since the Frente Amplio has come
to power. Nonetheless, the majority of these changes are clearly
not intersectional, in that they do not address overlapping forms
of difference in Uruguayan society. Still, it is important to under-
stand how these changes came about and to be attentive to why
the Frente Amplio has been willing to implement these varied ini-
tiatives. I discuss each of the factors that converged to promote
equality changes in turn, before ending with a brief discussion of
what motivates intersectional versus inclusionary state action.1
Mobilization from Below

Mobilization from below is a key necessary, though not sufficient,
condition for both intersectional action and inclusionary action.
The two groups that have been most successful in garnering con-
cessions from the state in the last five years, Afro-descendant
women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) actors,
are also those who mobilized quite strongly in the latter half of
the 2000s. Importantly, both groups significantly increased their
degrees of mobilization during this period, and changed the form
of their mobilizing strategies.
Afro-descendant women have been organizing in autonomous
fashion since the formation of GAMA in 1993. As a result of per-
ceived rebuffs from the broader feminist movement, black feminist
organizing from the period of 1993 until roughly 2004 tended
to be internally focused, dealing with the production of research
documents, self-esteem and self-help training, employment initia-
tives, and so forth (Townsend-Bell, 2007). This reflected not just
GAMA’s strategy, but OMA’s, a federated black organization of
whom GAMA formed a part. Beginning in 2004, GAMA and
OMA, recognizing the limits of this organizing schema and the
limits of attempting coalition with other civil society actors who
they perceived to be disinterested in such alliances, began to focus
their attention on greater interaction within the governments of
Montevideo and Uruguay. This new strategy reflected awareness
of Uruguay’s very state- and party-centered political society. In
short order OMA and the Frente Amplio headed government of
Montevideo established a Thematic Unit for Afro-descendant’s in
the municipality, to be followed by similar postings in the national
Frente Amplio run government, beginning in the 2005 period. As
one GAMA director noted:
You know, before we really had a very punctual relationship [with

the government]. We worked with the government in specific
instances, but it was nothing very profound . . . The change we are
making now is a structural one, designed to create more space for
us in the government and based on the realization that the black
collectivity have to insert ourselves, so that all entities are taken
into account by the government. [The goal is to make them real-
ize] that racism is an issue; it is not a minimal theme. (GAMA
director, March 2005)
This strategy proved to be a positive move. Although, GAMA

and OMA were somewhat skeptical of the governments’ com-
mitment to issues of race and gender, both the municipal and
national Frente Amplio administrations proved open to creat-
ing some institutional space for Afro-descendants. Thus this
move allowed activists to pursue political opportunities within
the state. Moreover, it opened greater interest and space for
civil society coalitions addressing race and gender, particularly
between new black feminist and black interest organizations that
have formed since 2006. “[Our attempt] at mainstreaming, has
generated a number of possibilities; we [now] have mechanisms
for inserting ourselves closer to the state in a positive way, this
is a new and interesting process and, [there is] fertile ground.”
Nonetheless, state insertion is not a cure-all, “there is still a his-
tory of exclusion and discrimination. The fact that I am here
does not negate that” (director, Secretariat for Afro-descendant
Women, June 2008).
LGBT groups have a much shorter history, with the oldest and
strongest of contemporary groups, Ovejas Negras (Black Sheep),
forming in December 2004, followed by several other groups in
2007 and 2008, including the national Uruguayan Federation for
Sexual Diversity (FUDIS) in 2007. These are not the first lesbian,
gay, or LGBT groups to form in Montevideo, but they do appear
to have lasted longer and had a greater impact in a short time,
particularly Ovejas Negras. Activists attribute this success to their
forward thinking organizing strategy.
We are very post-identity; that [an identity politics approach] is really

rooted in the 1990s when mainstreaming of politics was not the
norm. Those that have adopted the new method [of mainstream-
ing] have been more successful. Those that are too traditional,
insisting that everything be designed, instituted, and directed
by them have not been effective. We [the LGBT movement] have
matured. Our major goal was and is to coalesce with other orga-
nizations as the most effective strategy. It was us who started the
LGBT coordination [FUDIS] two years ago, and then abandoned
it, because we really have to follow the trajectory [of working with
strong organizations]. Many of those groups [other LGBT groups]
are two persons, they are not even groups, much less organiza-
tions. Our allies can be in other sectors. (Ovejas Negras members,
October 2010)
LGBT activists, particularly members of Ovejas Negras, felt

that the most effective strategy would be to form alliances with
other civil society actors, particularly feminist groups, who could
function as their allies and help to provide them with a form of
political capital that could result in positive changes, particularly
in the form of legislation. For LGBT activists this meant, primar-
ily, aligning with feminists and with making a case for how sexual-
ity and gender discrimination are overlapping issues, and thus of
interest to feminists.
Importantly, according to contemporary LGBT activists,
earlier and more fleeting gay and lesbian groups had not taken
this approach, leaving them disengaged from potential allies.
Contemporary LGBT activists argue that earlier LGBT organiz-
ing attempts were unsuccessful because they did not act strategi-
cally, by helping feminists and other potential allies to make these
connections. They argue that earlier activists should have taken a
similar approach, not because it was the “right” or most ideologi-
cally consistent approach, but because it was the most politically
effective. As one activist noted, “Even today there is no lesbian
movement because of feminist unwillingness to recreate itself
philosophically . . . [So what] we have done is to really emphasize
post-material themes such as sexual diversity and its importance to
feminism” (LGBT activist, October 2010). In essence, contempo-
rary LGBT activists have moved beyond arguments that it should
be obvious to feminists and other equality activists why sexual
equality is important, or that feminists should feel responsibility
for engendering all forms of equality, and moved toward what they
consider the more pragmatic route of making those links for them.
Like all mobilizing strategies, this approach has had consequences.
“The response was timid at first; there was no place [for LGBT
issues] within the liberal focus of other organizations. We are now
accepted as legitimate actors, though things are still tentative and
somewhat difficult” (Ovejas Negras member, October 2010).
Thus, the form in which LGBT activists mobilized varied
somewhat from Afro-descendants, yet both groups’ mobilizing
strategies share a focus on moving away from isolationist or group-
specific organizing approaches, to making links to other actors
with political capital. In both cases these strategies have had their
limitations, but do appear to have allowed more positive move-
ment forward than either movement had experienced in the past.
I nternational P ressure
As noted previously, Latin America in general is undergoing an
intense period of change, with states, intellectuals, and civil soci-
ety activists moving from staunch arguments that racial and ethnic
discrimination was nonexistent in the region, and that gender dis-
crimination could not be seen in the light of Western feminism, to
formal state recognition of gender equality, and racial and ethnic
diversity. Much of this change has been the hard fought result
of often dangerous organizing by Latin American citizens. But
these inclusionary agendas have also been informed and aided by
international actors in the form of international nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (IGOs),
and other states. Analysts describe the International Labor
Organization’s publication of Convention 169, the Indigenous
and Tribal Peoples Convention in 1989, the UN conferences
for gender equality, especially the Fourth World Conference on
Women (Beijing) in 1995, and the first World Conference Against
Racism (WCAR) in 2001, as invaluable mechanisms for forcing
governments to take up discussions of equality previously off lim-
its (Hooker, 2009; Wade, 2009).
Moreover, activists of all stripes describe the support of inter-
national NGOs and IGOs, ranging from the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) to country-specific orga-
nizations, and international governments such as the United States,
Spain, and Canada as invaluable resources that allow them to fund
research and advocacy projects designed, in part, to help convince
domestic governments of the need for action. This has been par-
ticularly true of Uruguay, where activists do not describe a set-
ting in which the government is forced or bullied into providing
concessions to equality actors, but rather speak to the support of
international entities in funding projects and providing the rhe-
torical support for agenda items that they want to move forward,
including projects promoted and run by the municipal and national
governments, but funded by international actors.
For instance, Afro-descendants speak of the rhetorical space that
the WCAR provided as especially important for allowing them to
broach the previously taboo topic of racism in Uruguay. Though
activists had managed to convince the government to perform a
special housing census in 1996 that counted people by race for

the first time since the 1800s, they reported numerous barriers
to analysis or action on racism at the public level (GAMA mem-
bers, August 2003). Activists indicate that it was only after the
WCAR that they began to get real traction on issues of racism and
racial equality, including perhaps the most far-reaching and inter-
sectional project thus far, three housing developments for black
female heads of household living under the poverty line (OMA
director, July 2003).
GAMA activists describe this long requested form of affirma-
tive action and reparation for forced removal of black communities
from their traditional neighborhoods during the dictatorship as
a political nonstarter prior to the WCAR. “One of the points of
the UN Durban conference given to the state was to make repa-
rations to the black community for the dislocations from barrios
Sur, Palermo, and the Cordón. It was really as a result of the UN
Recommendations that we finally achieved this demand” (GAMA
director, May 2008). Afro-descendants, particularly GAMA,
made a successful argument that because more than half of black
citizens are women, and because traditional black neighborhoods
were also poor and working-class neighborhoods, these repara-
tions should take the form of housing for Afro-descendant female
heads of household below the poverty line. Though progress on
the housing had been made under previous governments, the pro-
cess was slow and uneven until the Frente’s election in 2005. The
first phase of the housing development was completed finally in
early 2010.
International support has a direct impact on equality actors’
ability to mobilize. Activists note that the increased isolationism
of the United States in regard to Latin America, “almost killed
the black movement . . . [Fortunately] the UN and Spain appeared;
Spain in particular gave a lot of money, although it is less now”
(Afroasamblea activist, October 2010). Funding from the Spanish
government and other entities has helped fund government-sup-
ported projects, such as a soon to be finished National House of
Afro-Uruguayan Culture, alongside surveys and outreach materi-
als publicizing civil unions and gender quotas.
In addition, regional relationships have been quite important,
especially for LGBT and feminist groups, who have used a rhetoric
of what peer countries are or are not doing to good effect. Activists
describe this strategy as particularly effective when they can make

comparisons between Uruguay and Argentina, using LGBT, femi-
nist, or general human rights legislative initiatives in Argentina to
make an argument for what Uruguay should be doing (Paulón,
2010; Ravecca, 2010).
Party System Change, Low-Cost Solutions,

and Intersectional Demands
Thus far I have emphasized the importance of mobilization from
below and international pressure, which I will tentatively delineate
respectively as a necessary and a sufficient condition, as conditions
creating the possibility for inclusionary and intersectional action.
Party system change has been an important sufficient condition for
inclusionary and intersectional action. This has occurred alongside
two additional necessary conditions: low-cost solutions and inter-
sectional demands from activists. The Frente Amplio coalition’s
achievement of an outright majority of votes for the legislature
(55.09%) and, for the first time in recent Uruguayan history, the
executive (51.67%), was the culmination of a significant shift in
one of the oldest two party systems of the Americas. The Frente’s
2004 victory left the historically dominant Colorado party with
only 10.6 percent of parliamentary seats, potentially reconfiguring
the electoral landscape to a new two-party system made up of the
Frente Amplio and the historic opposition party, the National, or
Blanco, party. The Frente Amplio coalition retained its majority
in the 2009–2010 elections, although not with the same degree
of dominance as was the case for the 2004–2005 election. The
Frente Amplio coalition currently holds 51.9 percent of legisla-
tive seats, while current president José Mujica won 47.96 percent
of the vote in the first round of presidential elections, prompting
a run-off election and resulting in a final vote total of 52.39 per-
cent for Mujica. Thus it is as yet unsettled whether Uruguay is
most accurately described as a two-party system or a two-and-
a-half-party system. What is certain is that the Frente Amplio is
institutionalizing and gives the appearance that it will continue
to be a significant force in Uruguayan politics, while the fortunes
and viability of the historically dominant, centrist Colorado party
remain unclear. In sum, Uruguay has undergone a significant, if
still potentially unfinished, party system change in recent years.
The rise of a leftist party is a crucial part of the explanation of

why Uruguay has seen such rapid movement on issues of equality.
It is worth considering briefly why the Frente Amplio has been
willing to support these kinds of changes. While it is a leftist, or
what some would call simply a progressive, government that is
no reason to suspect that it would be any more open to issues of
equality, diversity, and the like than any other type of government.
Indeed, the Frente Amplio consistently has made clear that class
equality is its central concern. The first administration’s attention
centered primarily on reducing poverty rates and assuaging the
negative and lingering impacts of the 2002 economic crisis when it
assumed power in 2005. Thus support for the changes mentioned
above was far from guaranteed.
Yet, some have argued that it is the Frente Amplio’s own
history that paved the way for greater attention to difference.
Many of its members, including President Mujica, were jailed
either for participation in the 1970s urban guerilla movement,
the Tupamaros, or under suspicion of treason or other equally
trumped-up charges that were brought as a way to quell the fast
rising popularity of an outsider party that managed to claim
some 18 percent of the vote in its first electoral showing in 1971.
Although elections were suspended as a result of dictatorial rule
beginning in 1973, said suspension did not prevent further arrests,
torture, or, for the lucky ones, exile. As one Uruguayan political
scientist has noted, “It’s important that the Frente Amplio suf-
fered so much in the 1970s, because they [the members of the
Frente Amplio] really understand the idea of human rights, it’s
not just an abstract concept” (Ravecca, 2010). Equality activists
make a similar argument:
It cost them [society] a lot to recognize other types of discrimi-

nation; for so many years it was all about poverty, that was the
only type of discrimination that anyone recognized. Only recently
has this changed. [Why?] Because of the new government primar-
ily. It has helped many to realize that that there are many differ-
ent types of discrimination. But the process has been slow, even
within the government. It costs them a lot to understand the need.
To understand the difference between discrimination and racism.
Discrimination occurs to everyone—women, indigenous people,
homosexuals, etc. Racism is just an issue of Afro-descendants.
(OMA Member, Member of Government; May 2008)
Thus it appears that the government is committed to imple-

mentation of what it considers human rights initiatives, although
this process has been somewhat uneven, reflecting achievement
of some demands and setbacks on others. Said differently, party
system change offered a new window of opportunity for social
activists, with state actors showing commitment to some of the
demands introduced, and not others. There has been important
variation in the types of legislation, policy solutions, and other ini-
tiatives sought, with only a small number of those positive changes
mentioned above, specifically, state action regarding women of
color, falling under the category of intersectional change. There
are a number of reasons for these variations, chief among them
(1) how costly the suggested solutions are (2) and what kinds of
solutions were demanded.
Activists argue that the Frente Amplio has been more respon-
sive to what might loosely be called “human rights initiatives.”
However, it is the case that some legislative initiatives and policy
solutions have come to fruition while others, particularly femi-
nist movement initiatives like abortion and gender quotas, have
failed or have been watered down significantly. Given that the
sexual education and reproductive rights bill, including abortion,
passed both houses of the legislature in 2008, and that the presi-
dent vetoed only that part of the bill regarding the decriminaliza-
tion of abortion, it may be reasonable to say that that result was
the idiosyncratic outcome of one President Vázquez’s (or as some
argue, his very Catholic wife’s) moral and religious preferences.
But gender quotas, though they did pass, did not fare a much bet-
ter outcome. As mentioned, the quota requires that candidates of
both sexes be represented in every three places on the electoral list
for both houses, through at least the first fifteen places. Where
only two seats are contested, then two sexes shall be represented,
and lists that fail to comply will be rejected by the Electoral Court.
Yet, the law is only applicable to the 2014–2015 period, with no
guarantee of renewal.
Thus, both the longevity and impact of the law are unresolved
questions. Even the formal promoters of the law, the women’s cau-
cus of the Uruguayan Parliament express mixed feelings regard-
ing the need for and the potential impact of the legislation. One
supporter affirmed, “It is a very timid law, but it was the only
consensus possible,” while another indicated her opposition to
the legislation, “I have my own value, my own worth. I don’t need

to be here just because of some rule that says I have to be here.
And what happens now? Right now I am here on my own merit,
but after they will say, ‘well we had to.’ Women have to want to
be here. There is no need for a quota, women just have to work
harder and want it . . . At times we women assassinate ourselves”
(Member of Parliament, October 2010; Member of Parliament,
October 2010). Similar concerns about whether gender quotas
were the right strategy were echoed in the floor debates. There
were numerous arguments against the legislation, but only two
senators voted against the bill in the end. According to Niki
Johnson and Verónica Pérez (2010, 36), this was not because
they had changed their positions, but because they felt it was the
“politically correct” thing to do, and because the commitment is
of a very limited nature.
In sum, the gender quota bill seems to have created a dilemma for
the Frente Amplio. The party wants to appear progressive and for-
ward thinking on issues of equality, but, unlike the other advances
mentioned above, the legislation of gender quotas requires a sig-
nificant change in the rules regarding candidate selection, and ulti-
mately seat apportionment and power distribution. To put it bluntly,
gender quotas are very costly, particularly given that Uruguay has
historically never claimed more than 15 percent women represented
in Parliament.2 This is the sense in which the Member of Parliament
argued that the quota legislation achieved was “the only consensus
possible;” an unpopular and otherwise unpassable bill was success-
ful because it was introduced as one-time experiment that could,
but would not necessarily be, extended, and that would not be
immediately applicable.
Language legislating rights for LGBT citizens may be considered
quite costly as well, and it is reasonable to argue that this would
be true for much of Latin America. However, the Uruguayan case
presents a number of caveats that appear to have made this legisla-
tion less politically risky than might be assumed. First, although
the Catholic church does hold sway in Uruguayan society, it is
still the case that Uruguay is and has been staunchly secular since
the early twentieth century. Indeed, analysts have long described
Uruguay as the most secular country in Latin America (Loveman,
1998). Moreover, the Frente Amplio does not identify as a party
with any religious attachments, while it does identify as a party very
interested in the promotion of human rights. Nonetheless, there

was definitely opposition from the church and other conservative
actors in society, as well as minority opposition within legislature.
But the Frente Amplio’s legislative majority was sufficiently large
that minority party opposition was not sufficient to overcome an
affirmative vote. Similarly, the church’s lobbying efforts and sway
in society was not significant enough to create major opposition
within the electorate. Thus Frente members were free to vote their
conscience on these issues without worry of major backlash from
the electorate. Importantly, the Frente Amplio’s factions routinely
suspend party line voting requirements on “conscience issues”
such that individual members who were not in favor of such leg-
islation were equally free to vote their preference without fear of
political repercussions.
Indeed as one LGBT activist noted, “No one changes their vote
because of social themes. The only thing that makes people switch
their votes here is economic redistribution . . . [and remember]
these are only formal rights” (Ovejas Negras member, October
2010). In fact, activists argued that it was, in part, because of
the lingering effects of the economic crisis that they were able to
secure this legislation, in that one result of the crisis was an even
greater inattention to social issues than normal. Moreover, LGBT
activists indicate that they are well aware of the limits of formal
rights, both in pushing larger cultural change, and in terms of
how well they are enforced. Activists report that there needs to be
much more emphasis in actual implementation of the laws, areas
in which the government has been much less supportive. This has
been especially true for the most controversial of the laws, the legal
sex change registration. Activists report that it was much harder to
find the votes for that law, among the Left as well as the Right.
There was no public debate on that law, but it was still very con-
troversial, and the law remains inoperative while the government
creates a commission of experts from the Ministries of Health and
Culture to whom those who want to change their sex would have
to go and make their case. Indeed, activists indicate that they see
this commission as a smokescreen meant to stall the effectuation
of the law indefinitely (Ovejas Negras member, October 2010). In
sum, the laws are paradoxically far-reaching but also limited both
in their scope and execution. It would be inaccurate to argue that
this legislation is simply symbolic, but it may be equally inaccurate
to argue that such legislation required a significant expenditure of

political capital on the part of state actors.
Similarly, the naming of women and men of color to various
posts in government, and the designation of black female head of
household developments are no small feat in a country that con-
tinues to identify itself as homogeneous and European, and which
was quite hostile to public discussions surrounding race for the
majority of history. Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue that these
changes required much in the way of real concessions from the
Frente Amplio. In one case, the position of special advisor to the
president, the position was really subject to the whim of presidential
interests; it was not renewed under current president José Mujica.
In regard to the housing developments, the original agree-
ment calls for some 90 apartments, only 36 of which have been
completed as of early 2011. Moreover, though the municipal and
national government have supported the development of the apart-
ments, it was always agreed that the women themselves would be
responsible for the majority of the construction, which increases
potential residents’ investment in their homes, but which also lim-
its the symbolic and financial commitment of the governments.
Finally, in a move that makes this project arguably more intersec-
tional, if less an affirmative action project, the housing is officially
designated as a black female head of household development, and
the majority of the owners are Afro-descendant women. But there
is no questionnaire or affidavit requiring women to claim their
blackness for admission to the apartments. In reality any woman
who meets the economic qualifications can apply for the housing
(Assessor, Ministry of Housing, May 2008).
The naming of a Secretariat for Afro-descendant women, and
the later appointment of an Afro-descendant woman as director of
Inmujeres, is as equally far-reaching as the LGBT legislation and
other achievements listed above, and as with said legislation, the
positive (and negative) unintended consequences of such changes
remain to be seen. Nonetheless, without minimizing the progres-
sion represented, it is necessary to note that the secretariat is still
just one among several themes within Inmujeres. As the director
noted in 2008, “It is a complex process, but it is fertile. We are
closer. I cannot make decisions but the closeness [to decision mak-
ers] offers possibilities as well” (June 2008). Inmujeres, like many
such examples of state feminism, is not a ministry, does not claim
its own budget, and has little decision-making power. Moreover,

while the naming of Ramírez as director is a clear reflection of
Inmujeres’ commitment to working with Afro-descendant women,
this does not usurp her primary role as director of the National
Institute for Women.
C onclusion
Consequently, the convergence of several conditions was required
for inclusionary and intersectional action in Uruguay. Strong
mobilization from below, and low- to moderate-cost demands
appear to have been necessary for forward movement of all kinds,
while party system change and international pressure were impor-
tant sufficient conditions for such progress. Finally, it appears
that one additional necessary condition was required for explicitly
intersectional action. This was simply that groups sought explicitly
intersectional action. Afro-descendant women tied their demands
to race, gender, and, in a more implicit fashion, class, and were
successful in pushing forward their claims.
The Uruguayan case points to an emerging conclusion in other
locales; states are primarily in the business of promoting inclusion-
ary action, not intersectionality (Manuel, 2007; Squires, 2008).
This is not necessarily a critique of states. Scholars are right to point
out that even where states have attempted intersectional action,
they have often failed to meet the bar (Kantola and Nousiainen,
2009). But what is apparent in the Uruguayan case is that though
there may be a constituency who would like to see states do more,
or perform better in this regard, there is larger constituency that
has not expressed such interests. This second category includes
groups like the general Uruguayan electorate who was not par-
ticularly concerned about concessions granted to LGBT and black
women activists, opposition groups expressly opposed to even tra-
ditional inclusionary approaches, and the very civil society groups
who did not demand intersectional solutions. Arguably, such pro-
posals may have been political nonstarters in most cases. But as
the black female head of household development indicates, such
outcomes are possible even if very infrequent.
A larger group of positive cases and more analysis is needed to
know whether there are additional necessary or sufficient condi-
tions for intersectional action by the state besides those addressed
here, but certainly a minimally necessary condition is that such

action is requested. This may be so simple a condition as to seem
obvious, but the fact remains that no one besides the black women
activists made such requests or integrated such analysis into their
political appeals. Quotas were so costly that significant compro-
mise (or even failure according to some respondents) was likely
under any circumstances, but to what extent concerns about a wave
effect (e.g., if we give women quotas who else will demand them)
could have been addressed by integrating some form of racial or
at least class analysis into the appeal is an open question. Not only
was black female (and male) support of quotas very tepid because
such issues were not addressed, but the Frente Amplio’s concern
with class and the lack of attention to that as a central issue may
well have diluted the proposal’s likelihood of passage in its original
form, whether because some Frente members’ only qualm was the
lack of a class analysis, or because party members would have felt it
too politically costly to vote against a proposal that addressed what
they claimed to be an issue of primary importance.
The lack of intersectional analysis did not seem to harm LGBT
activists (and may well have hurt them) but what is striking is that
most of the concessions gained, and all of those that have actually
been implemented, were primarily for the lesbian and gay mem-
bers of their constituency. There has been much less attention to
bisexual, and especially to transgender members, although activ-
ists routinely emphasize greater rights for transgender individuals
as one of their major priorities.
So can states act intersectionally? Yes. But they frequently do
not. Is attention to difference beyond simple identity politics the
same as intersectionality? No. But that is not necessarily a critique.
Inclusionary action is important too and in the Latin American
context, where the existence of any significant differences beyond
class were routinely denied even some 10 or 20 years ago, it is a great
step forward. Moreover, as I have argued here, where states do not
claim to be engaging in such action, and where no one is demand-
ing it, then the lack of intersectional activity is unsurprising.
Notes
1. Inclusionary action can refer to a variety of things but most fre-
quently means a traditional equality approach. That is that particular
homogeneously defined groups not be excluded from the rights and

responsibilities that other citizens have. Specifically, inclusionary
action can take unidimensional form, as just described, in which one
dimension of difference: race, class, sexuality is addressed, or multi-
dimensional form, in which at least two, but less than the full class of
important differences in a society are addressed, and in which such
differences are addressed in a manner that assumes each difference to
have a discrete effect.
2. Currently the Chamber of Deputies has 15 female members, which
translates to 15.2 percent.
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3
I D C a r ds a s Ac c ess: Neg o t i at i ng
Tr a ns ge n de r (a n d I n t e r se x)
B odi e s i n t o t h e C h i l e a n
L eg a l Sy st e m
Penny Miles
I decided to enroll in another college. I put on my tracksuit trou-

sers, tied my hair back. This was back in 1999. I arrive for enrol-
ment, I take a number, and after a while I am called. “Take a seat
please, miss.” Me, with my certificate in my hand, my certificate
with a man’s name on it . . . I sat down, he asked me why I had left
my previous college if I had such good grades . . . He is about to
register me, [so] I tell him, “there’s a problem.” I told him to look
at the name on the certificate . . . He said, “if you’re going to bring a
false certificate, you should at least bring one with a woman’s name
on it, why on earth did you bring one with a man’s name on it?”
I replied, “It’s not false, it’s mine.” So I took out my ID card and
passed it to him. He recoiled . . . he recoiled and then he said, “No,
no, no, there’s not going to be any registration today.” And I said,
“What do you mean, there’ll be no registration today. Five seconds
ago there was, and now there isn’t?”1
(Mariana, trans activist, May 2009)
M ariana’s narrative presents just one example of the complexi-

ties of going about daily life as a transgender or intersex person
in Chile contemporary. In a society where identity (ID) cards are
central to accessing most services, from public health to the labor
market, the incongruence between self-presentation and official
identification serve to perpetuate the discriminatory practices
64 Penny Miles
directed toward transgender2 and intersex individuals. This fre-

quently results in the denial of access to basic rights. These are
seen as part of a vicious circle. Not having a legal identity con-
gruent with the person’s adopted gender essentially implies exclu-
sion from education, employment, and health. Such a scenario has
encouraged some to seek legal change to gender and name status
as a means of ameliorating their inclusion in society. However, in
order to do so, individuals need sufficient financial resources to
undergo surgery and hormonization in a costly, privatized health
service. Though gender identity is not currently regulated by law,
a gap in the law has thus far been exploited in order to allow indi-
viduals to “re-sex” their transgender bodies. However, this has
occurred predominantly in the cases of “the post-surgical body”
(Sharpe, 2002, 3). Since 2007, there has been an increasing ten-
dency to present more “transgressive” (Roen, 2002) petitions that
seek gender recognition for preoperative3 transsexuals and trans-
gendered people.
This chapter focuses on transgender activism in Chile. Given
the extent of social exclusion for members of these communities,
the legal processes to achieve gender recognition, has become a
central feature of that activism. “Gender recognition” refers to
the demands presented by transsexual and transgender individu-
als who wish to have their adopted gender identity recognized,
where it differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. I focus
on both the direct and indirect outcomes of such legal action in
Chile in the late 2000s, as a number of these cases have been sup-
ported by lawyers working in the public interest who are seeking
not only legal change, but who also use litigation as the basis for
political and social change (Sarat and Scheingold, 1998). Based
on ethnographic research conducted in Chile between 2008 and
2010, my analysis explores the processes and outcomes of this legal
action for the trans community. In order to make these realities
comprehensible for the reader, I firstly introduce some trans narra-
tives. The purpose of these narratives is to illustrate how difficult it
is to negotiate daily life with an identity card that is incompatible
with one’s adopted gender identity. Yet this must be understood
in a context where your ID card is central to carrying out the
most menial of tasks, such as depositing a check in a bank, visit-
ing a doctor, enrolling on a college course. I touch briefly on the
inaccessibility of the Chilean legislature in dealing with matters
ID C a r ds as Access 65
of sexual diversity, before discussing the pursuit of litigation as a

means of effecting legal change. In particular, I address how the
increase in litigation has been mirrored by an emergent trans male
movement. In addition, the coming together of the diverse actors
necessary to mount such legal challenges, which encompass medi-
cal and legal professionals, also points to the increased potential
for intersectional activism. As such the chapter considers the inter-
action between legal mobilization and social movement activism
(McCann, 1994, 2006). In addition, it examines the complexities
and heterogeneity of the trans community through the legal solu-
tions sought and obtained.
My research draws upon over 20 transgender cases in which I
conducted interviews, or of which I gained reliable secondhand
knowledge. While I am able to refer to a transgender community
in Chile, I am not yet able to do so for intersex populations. During
the research, I came across only two cases that sought recognition
for intersex individuals, only one of which I was able to access per-
sonally. The extent of the invisibility of the former is such that it
does not feature in Chilean LGBT4 activism. Currah, Juang, and
Minter note that “while transgender and intersex politics refer to
different constituencies and have significant differences in their
goals, [they] . . . nonetheless grapple with questions of autonomy
and gender self-determination” (2006, xv). My decision to include
only a brief discussion of intersex cases below is as a consequence
of that invisibility but also speaks to the relevance of some of the
same legal process.
ID C ards : Denial of Access

Mariana’s case illustrates just one of the many instances that respon-
dents recalled when describing how the excessive reliance on ID
cards to go about daily activities exacerbated the levels of exclusion
and discrimination that they faced. The following excerpts were
recorded with Emmanuel and Mauricio, two trans males. They
were in the latter stages of transition, having started hormoni-
zation and undergone some surgical processes. Emmanuel dem-
onstrates the problems associated with the ambiguity that arises
between his legal identity (female), as recognized on his ID card,
and his adopted gender identity (male). The excerpt highlights one
of the many frustrations he faced when he tried to convince others
66 Penny Miles
that he was legally female. He describes below how that impacted

on his ability to resolve his own monetary problems:
I was trying to sort out my debt. The person that worked in the
office didn’t understand that it was me on the [ID] card . . . She
said, “sir, you can only come and do this paperwork on her behalf
with a letter from the solicitor.” She never understood that it was
my card. I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or
cry, it was such a strange feeling, they just kept on saying “No” and
that I wasn’t the person that appeared on the ID card. (Emmanuel,
May 2009)
Mauricio’s extract, in turn, illustrates the constancy with which

trans people are forced to expose and explain themselves:
The other day I had to go and pay a fine. I went to talk to the judge.
He asked for my ID card and for me to fill in a form. Then he came
to me and said, “this bike is in someone else’s name.” I said, “it’s in
my name.” He replied, “no, this name . . . ” So I whispered to him
that I was undergoing a sex change. “Oh,” he said, “I’d never have
noticed.” I asked him if he could ask his secretary to call me by
my adopted [masculine] name. “What is it?” he asked . . . Later the
secretary came out and calls “Mauricio, Mauricio,” and I go into
the judge’s office. (Mauricio, May 2009)
Given the ethnographic nature of my research, on occasions I wit-

nessed how this experience of negotiating identity in relation to
the ID card was actually lived. The instance that I describe below
actually relates to an intersex case, but it exemplifies the complexity
of negotiating identity in public, and resonates with the transgen-
der experience. Juliana, who is intersex, had arranged to meet the
judge presiding over her case in person, in the hope of persuad-
ing him to rule in her favor, and agree to change the legal name
and gender assigned to her at birth. I was accompanying Juliana
on that visit to the courts. This visit, however, then led to a trip
to the hospital as more medical tests were deemed necessary. The
dearth of information on intersexuality in Chile meant that the
judge was relying heavily on medical evidence on which to base
his ruling, as he later relayed to me in conversation. In practice,
this meant frequent visits to hospitals, the Medical Legal Service5
and private clinics for Juliana. When we arrived at the hospital,
Juliana herself spoke to the receptionist, given that her expertise
on the matter far outweighed that of her lawyer. When the recep-
tionist asked if “Julio Moreno” (Juliana’s legal name) was among
us, Juliana—dressed in black heels, a smart black trouser suit, with
long dark wavy hair, French-manicured nails—answered that he
was not. I gleaned that from the ease and speed with which she
responded, that she had learnt to rebuff such questions as a means
of personal survival. This reliance on ID cards, and the resulting
frequency of such interactions, therefore renders everyday interac-
tion a complex, distressing, and destabilizing process, as individu-
als such as Juliana attempt to negotiate the dominant discourses
that stigmatize them as deviant. Taking an interactionist perspec-
tive, Rubington and Weinberg note that it “focuses on . . . how
people typify one another; how they relate to one another on the
basis of these typifications; and the consequences of these social
processes” (1996, 1).
Similarly, Erving Goffman analyzes stigma and social identity in
relation to its social setting and concludes that “society establishes
the means of categorizing persons and . . . social settings establish
the categories of persons likely to be encountered there” (1963,
11–12). He adds that stigma is perceived through interaction when
“not all undesirable attributes are at issue, but only those which
are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of indi-
vidual should be” (1963, 13). He defines stigma more directly as
“an attribute that is deeply discrediting” or “an undesired differ-
entness from what we had anticipated,” which is not possessed by
the “normals” (1963, 13, 15). In this instance, therefore, identities
that do not conform to the gender binary are viewed as “deeply
discrediting,” as evidenced in the interactions illustrated above.
The impact of this scenario certainly served to increase the sense
of urgency that Mauricio, Emmanuel, and Juliana all experienced
in needing to remedy this incongruence between legal and lived
identities.
W hy L itigation ?
In the legislative climate in Chile, moral conservatism has pre-
vailed vis-à-vis gender and sexuality rights since democratiza-
tion in 1990 (Blofield, 2001; Htun, 2003; Miles, forthcoming).
Divorce was not legalized until 2004 and reproductive rights
remain highly contested, as illustrated by extensive debates and
68 Penny Miles
mobilization around issues such as the morning-after-pill since

2008. An antidiscrimination bill, which proposes protection on
the basis of gender and sexual orientation, languished in Congress
from 2005, only being approved in November 2011. Opposition
to the inclusion of protections on the very basis of sexual orienta-
tion and gender were the principal cause for its lack of progress.
Fransisco Estévez, sociologist and head of the Division of Social
Organizations (DOS) between 2006 and 2010, attributes this
slow passage of the bill through Congress to the weighty opposi-
tion of both the more established Catholic Church and the emer-
gent Evangelical Church.
The sector linked to the Evangelical Church believes that homo-

sexuality is a sin . . . and so they cannot support a law that respects
sexual diversity because that means supporting something sinful.
And on the other hand, the Catholic Church is questioning the
law because it argues that it will facilitate more legislation being
passed; on adoption by same-sex couples, gay marriage, or same-
sex unions, etc., even though this law does not cover that. They
think that if is this law is passed, that the rest will follow more
quickly. (Fransisco, May 2009)
Vaggione concurs that across Latin America,
the Catholic Church’s hierarchy continues to be the main politi-

cal opponent to securing legislation and policy that favors the
articulation of sexual and reproductive rights. The legitimacy of
the Catholic Church and its representatives . . . limit the autonomy
of the governing classes and legislators . . . who seek support in the
Catholic hierarchy . . . Lobbying by representatives of the Catholic
Church with legislators and judges is an important obstacle to
seeking change in the legal system and jurisprudence which insti-
tutionalizes a traditional conception of the family. (2008, 14)
This traditional conception of the family encourages an adherence

to binary gender roles and heterosexual sexual relations. In 1999,
the Chilean legislature did actually decriminalize sodomy for
males engaging in same-sex practices over the age of 18, as activ-
ists and sympathetic politicians were able to capitalize on some
opportune political opportunities (Miles, 2004). However, the
legislature has comprised almost equal representation of members
of the opposing centrist left and right coalitions since 1990, and
it does not lend itself to favoring legislation pertaining to LGBTI
(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex) rights or
other matters that challenge the “moral” agenda. In one inter-
view, a left-wing deputy, María Antonieta Sáa, aptly remarked that
the Chilean population was being held “hostage to a conservative
elite” (María Antonieta, April 2010).
Consequently, legal mobilization strategies, or the use of litiga-
tion to advance or uphold one’s rights (Zemans, 1983), have been
increasingly used in recent years as a means of achieving social and
legal change by social movement and legal activists. Human rights
lawyers have been at the forefront of pushing for such change,
and these challenges now include transgender rights. In this spe-
cific instance, litigation has been used with the intention of secur-
ing legal recognition of name and gender change for transsexual,
transgender, and more recently, for intersex individuals. Though
such legal processes have been occurring since the 1980s at least,
recent petitions have both become more visible and more “trans-
gressive” (Roen, 2002) in their demands, especially since 2007.
Employing Bornstein’s language, Roen defines this transgression
as “subversive crossing, public and politically strategic transgender-
ing” (Roen, 2002, 502–503 quoting Bornstein, 1995). Petitions
are increasingly being presented where individuals have not under-
gone genital reassignment surgery (GRS). As I detail more fully in
the following section, transgression is evident as such cases move
into the public arena, instigated by trans and LGBTI activists.
Making the Legal Case

As the recognition of transgender, transsexual, and intersex identi-
ties falls outside existing legal frameworks in Chile, lawyers have
had to be creative in their interpretation of the law. Law 17.344
allows individuals to solicit changes to their forenames and sur-
names in accordance with Article 1. This states that when these
names are considered to cause “moral harm” and “when the peti-
tioner has been known for more than five years, with reasonable
motives, with names or surnames, or both, different to their own,”
voluntary petitions can be filed to have such changes recognized.6
Lawyers have thus argued that “moral harm” and “reasonable
motives” are justified in the cases of trans people where the official
70 Penny Miles
gender identity and name assigned to the individuals at birth

contradicts the individual’s adopted name and gender identity.
Greenberg’s observation that “traditionally, a person’s legal sex is
established by the sex that the birth attendant places on the birth
certificate” rings true in the Chilean case (2006, 52). Lawyers
were able to illustrate such moral harm and argue for reasonable
motives by citing the extreme marginalization and stigmatization
that members of these populations face as a consequence of exist-
ing outside the gender binary. As this legal process is subject to
interpretation by judges (and lawyers), the paperwork demanded
by judges in order to assess the case can vary. Some might ask for
reports from the Registry Office, psychological and/or psychiat-
ric reports, and often, physical examinations. The same office has
recorded the instances where name and gender change have been
granted, though these were granted usually only where GRS had
been performed.
Since 2007, however, petitions have been presented when indi-
viduals have not undergone GRS, thus attempting to break with
the equating of gender identity with genitalia (Sharpe, 2002).
In May 2007, Andrés Rivera, president of the Organization of
Transsexuals for the Right to Dignity (OTD), became the first
known transsexual man to achieve legal recognition of his adopted
name and gender without undergoing GRS. The judge who pre-
sided over the civil court in Rancagua based the ruling on the
psychological exams as proof of Andrés’s gender identity not on
his genitalia. It must be noted that other such cases may well have
been passed prior to Andrés’s. However, the invisibility surround-
ing such cases, exacerbated by the strength of sociocultural sanc-
tions for those that openly question the gender binaries in Chilean
society, have limited access to such cases.
M edia Dissemination and Trans (Male)

Organizing
The importance of media dissemination through various means
had been central to raising both trans (particularly male) identity
awareness and associated rights consciousness (Miles, 2011), and
expanding the realms of what is legally possible. As Andrés himself
notes that “the problem is that transsexuals are the invisible among
the invisibles, we are like the sub-minority within the minority
groups” (October 2008). The OTD has concentrated efforts on

dissemination and sensitization around trans issues through care-
fully selecting a number of documentaries to appear in. It was
through this means that Emmanuel first got to know about other
cases of male transsexualism, as he recounts below:
I saw a program on television . . . and it was the first time that I had
seen cases of male transsexualism . . . it was the first time that I real-
ized that it wasn’t my fault that I had been born this way . . . I got in
touch with Andrés and went to see him . . . For the first time I felt
understood, I met someone like me. Because most of the time you
feel that you are the only one. (Emmanuel, May 2009)
Others, such as Mauricio, arrived by a similar means and trans

male organizing thus emerged very tentatively in 2004 and 2005.
As Emmanuel indicates above, awareness of trans male identities
was practically nonexistent prior to this epoch, to such an extent
that Andrés adds:
We frequently assume lesbian identities as a means of protecting

ourselves. I would much rather say that I was lesbian than say that
I was a man, because otherwise your whole world will fall on you,
lesbians don’t have their worlds fall on them. (Andrés, October
2008)
Andrés, and others since, have appeared in other selected

documentaries. He notes that more individuals have approached
the organization through this means than through any other.
For example, he compares this to the number of people arriving
through the Internet. He reported OTD membership rising from
4 or 5 individuals in 2004–2005 to more than 31 in 2008 with
numbers continuing to grow:
About 3 months ago I appeared on a television program. I always

appear on medical programs, as I’d never wanted to be interviewed
on sensationalist programs. But analyzing the situation with my
partner, we realized that there was a segment of the population
that we hadn’t reached, because young people don’t watch medi-
cal programs. Among those programs that were calling me, was
one called “Night Owl” [Animal Nocturno]. It’s a very popular
program and after that show 7 trans people got in touch with me.
72 Penny Miles
So we realized that effectively there were people that we still hadn’t

reached. And, of course, I will have to appear again. (Andrés,
October 2008)
Though political objectives are clearly inherent in trans male orga-

nizing, many of those who arrive are seeking support, practical help,
comprehension, and a space to share experiences, as Emmanuel
indicates previously. Another activist, Nadia, also remarked on
the impact that the first meeting had on new members as they
expressed their incredulity that they were not the “only ones” to
be living that “experience” (Nadia, November 2008) when they
first joined OTD and came to share their lived experience.
Closely tied to the transition process that many then decide to
undertake, through hormonization and/or surgical procedures, is
the associated legal process. Much of the engagement with the
movement for each individual therefore relates to the importance
of being able to access services that facilitate the physical and legal
transition of adopting a new gender identity. Lukas Berredo, of
Trans Male Support Group (GAHT), and the president of the
Gender Dysphoria Support Group (AADGE), both confirmed
that many members of their organizations were interested in
achieving legal change. For both GAHT and OTD the need for
a change in the law that facilitates gender recognition is central to
their political agenda as a consequence of the centrality of the ID
card in regulating everyday interaction in Chilean life.
Trans female organizing has had a broader activist agenda in
contrast to the recently emerged trans male movement in Chile.
Trans women began organizing in the 1990s, at first, affiliated
to the two main umbrella LGBT7 organizations, Homosexual
Liberation Front (MOVILH) and the Movement for Unified
Minorities (MUMS). These emerged after the transition to demo-
cratic rule. They then formed their own group in 2000, firstly
through Traves Chile, and later through other organizations, such
as the Amanda Jofre Syndicate. Cristina L ópez, activist with both
organizations, though affiliated to the latter since 2003, differen-
tiates trans female organizing from other LGBT and even trans
male organizing:
It’s about gender, massively about gender. It’s incredible. Imagine

that Andrés gets his legal documents in just two years, he practi-
cally gets married in the public eye, everyone knows about him
and he doesn’t care . . . But it’s also about how you run an orga-
nization. Trans men deal with their personal objectives, which
are to deal with their transsexualism, then they leave activism.
They work alone. It’s a matter of gender. Here, all the girls work
together. We estimate that there about 400 or 500 trans women
in the metropolitan region, and of those, 150 are registered with
the organization. But we attend to all of those in the metropolitan
region . . . If we hand out condoms, we go to Vivaceta, Puente Alto,
Independencia, Macul. If a girl dies, we organise the funeral . . . If
one has been attacked, we put her in the case and take her to
hospital . . . we also attend to the foreigners because they are much
more vulnerable. (Cristina, June 2009)
L ópez attributes this difference to the greater vulnerability

of trans women in Chilean society and how they must deal with
the everyday difficulties associated with extreme social and eco-
nomic marginalization from education, employment, and health
spheres, which has forced many into prostitution as a means of
survival. Female trans organizing has therefore centered around
the practical concerns of dealing with life on the streets and the
vulnerabilities which extend from that. Though the very incon-
gruence between official and adopted gender identity as indicated
on their ID cards is also central to such marginalization, the dif-
ficulties with dealing with basic everyday survival has meant that
less attention has been paid to attempting to advance the legal
agenda, though a number of trans women have either name and/
or gender recognition.
In the majority of cases the latter has only occurred where geni-
tal reassignment surgery has been performed. As Cristina notes in
more straightforward terms: “you have to get a certificate from
the Medical Legal Service which says that you no longer have a
penis, and that you have a vagina. And as you have a vagina, you
argue that you can no longer be called Juanito and so you call
yourself Juanita” (Cristina, May 2009. When trans women trade
their masculinity for feminity, the costs are very high in a soci-
ety that privileges notions of hegemonic masculinity (Connell,
1995). Both financial and symbolic consequences result from the
complex reordering of gender relations that transgenderism and
transsexualism imply in this context. One of the principal reasons
behind these petitions being presented without GRS is the finan-
cial implications of undergoing surgery.
74 Penny Miles
Returning to the transgender divide, when conversing with

trans women, I noted more skepticism as regards the possibilities
that they would have been able to achieve legal change without
gender reassignment surgery. But there was also a sense that the
legal process was futile, given that of those that had secured their
legal change, some had fallen back into the same vicious circle.
Even securing the ID card had not enabled trans women to be
able to integrate into society in the same way that trans men had.
However, this could be related to the stage at which trans men had
embarked on their transition process. Most trans women reported
falling out of the education stage at an earlier age due to fact that
they adopted their gender identity often in secondary school. In
contrast, most men that I spoke with had begun to transition in
their twenties or thirties, and in some instances, in their forties. By
which time some had secured a decent education and had engaged
in professional activities. One taught in university, another was an
engineer, and another was a music teacher. Of the trans women
who had presented petitions, one had worked her way up through
the council to work as a secretary, and another worked in her
friend’s Internet café and another was studying. However, the
majority of the others drifted in and out of the informal economy
and prostitution.
Connell’s “patriarchal dividend” (1995, 80–82) recognizes
women’s subordination even by those males unable to realize the
hegemonic ideal of masculinity. The differentiated access to edu-
cation, qualifications, and employment noted above, indicates
that even where dominant notions of masculinity are transgressed
when females transition to males, that notions of patriarchy pre-
vail. The interplay of gender and class are also relevant in these
cases, as the masculinities framework suggests. Two of the four
males who achieved both name and gender recognition both dis-
tanced themselves from the respective groups they were affiliated
to during their transitioning process. AADGE also suffered a
similar fate when the president, after having achieved his change
after winning a unique legal battle to secure a free GRS opera-
tion, stopped being active. As the driving force of AADGE, with-
out his activism the group became redundant. The cases he was
involved with are, however, still being represented by the Human
Rights Office of the Legal Aid Corporation. MOVILH presi-
dent, Rolando Jiménez recognized the tendency of individuals
to distance themselves from the organization once their legal

or other issue had been resolved. Alternatively, Cristina under-
stands the need for continued action for trans women even after
achieving recognition through the courts due to the continued
difficulties in accessing those dividends such as employment and
education. In contrast, trans men become increasingly more
autonomous in their actions and associations, as they are now
able to access the material and symbolic conditions that had pre-
viously been denied them.
D irect O utcomes
In his work on legal mobilization, McCann (1994, 2006) argues
that litigation can facilitate social movement development and
consolidation. He contends that this can be achieved directly
through securing favorable rulings or indirectly through associ-
ated processes that occur as a consequence of undertaking legal
action, though the latter have played a greater role in movement
consolidation. Drawing upon his categories, the case of trans male
movement development particularly, and in trans movements
more generally, both direct and indirect outcomes have played a
significant role in the development of trans organizing within the
broader LGBTI movement in Chile.
In examining the jurisprudential outcomes of the cases that I
accessed during fieldwork, two key trends emerge.8 The first refers
to the increasing disparity in judicial sentences pertaining to name
and gender recognition. The second relates to the gendered nature
of that disparity. A pattern of differentiated citizenship is emerging
as a consequence of the decision to present petitions where GRS
has not been performed and where the scope for legal interpreta-
tion is apparently broader where genitalia do not coincide with
the adopted gender identity. In some cases both name and gender
change are agreed by judges, and in others, only name changes are
granted (and sometimes only petitioned for as AADGE president
noted). In the worst-case scenario, both are rejected.
From my case studies, OTD had secured name and gender
changes for three trans men and had supported a name change
that had occurred in the north of Chile, while GAHT had secured
one more in January 2010. AADGE had supported a number of
cases where name changes only had been granted, though more
76 Penny Miles
petitions are being contested in the civil courts currently. Of the

six petitions presented by MOVILH and the public interest liti-
gation clinic affiliated to the Diego Portales University (UDP),
all four cases that were completed were rejected in the lower
courts. Only one case won on appeal, and only then was the name
change granted. The other cases were rejected on appeal. The
UDP reported that it intended to continue with the cases and as
of April 2010 it was discussing possible strategies. This differenti-
ated citizenship therefore seemingly has a gendered dimension to
it. It reaffirms Julie A. Greenberg’s assertion that “the law’s role
in gender assignments is multifaceted and contradictory” (noted
in Currah, Juang, and Minter 2006, xviii). At least one outcome
of this disparity in judicial sentences is the emergence of different
possible paths to some modicum of legal recognition.
Though some petitions only seek name change and as a con-
sequence could be considered as actively seeking a level of dif-
ferentiated citizenship, Lukas Berredo of GAHT clarified this as
“being better than nothing,” and that it would allow many “to
get by” (Lukas, April 2010). He believed that the name on the ID
card was more salient in negotiating everyday interaction. He con-
tended that fewer people actually focused on the gender. However,
accepting this second-best result is indicative of the lack of belief in
the system and being able to achieve a fuller sense of citizenship,
equality, and integration. This has been facilitated by the fact that
individuals are now able to appear in their ID photos in accordance
with their adopted gender identity. Before, trans women were
forced to appear with short hair and adopt a masculine appearance
that coincided with their name. As Mariana notes:
We have achieved changes to the photos that the Registry Office

are willing to accept [on our ID cards]. Before, they insisted that
we transsexuals had to disguise ourselves as men in order to get our
ID card. We had to modify our aesthetics, in other words, tie our
hair back, take our make up off, and dress like a man just to have
our photo taken for the ID card. But we challenged that, and now
that’s not necessary. You can have your photo taken however you
want, with your hair down. (Mariana, May 2009)
A second outcome can be read as arising from this disparity.

When questioning the gender dimension to this differentiated citi-
zenship, however, all trans activists concurred that one group took
a “step up” the social hierarchy, and the other took a “step down.”
They argued that female-to-male trans people achieved the for-
mer, and that the latter referred to male-to-female trans people. In
Latin American societies, where patriarchy continues to prevail,
gender equality remains highly underdeveloped in both law and
practice, and is manifest in societal relations through machismo.
This second theme emerging from the legal disparity is reinscrib-
ing gender binaries where those transitioning to males can be seen
as benefiting from Connell’s patriarchal dividend.
This reinscription undermines the possibility of capitalizing on
direct outcomes because dominant social discourse has encour-
aged “assimilationist” over “transgressive” responses. Even where
name and gender changes have been achieved in the case of the
four trans men I mentioned, only Andrés declared the outcome
publicly by putting his face to the cause. Whilst the others were
willing to allow their cases to be published on the respective web-
sites, and conceded interviews and so forth, they did not do visibly.
Of the one trans female case that it is known about where name
and gender recognition were achieved without undergoing GRS,
the individual also refused to go public. Prior to presenting the six
petitions in June 2007, MOVILH came across the said case and
approached her to see if she would support the case by coming
out. In public interest litigation strategies, it is believed that the
impact of the case is more potent when the public is exposed to
the individual case, and that the media responds well to testimony.
Mariana, in her activist role noted:
The girl from the north who got a favorable ruling didn’t want to
“come out.” She’s not interested, she’s got her life, it’s also under-
standable that she doesn’t want to come out to the press . . . and
that she doesn’t want people to know who she is. It’s also counter-
productive for us. If you are transsexual and you want to “pass” as
a normal woman, you also have to live anonymously. If you appear
on television, they say “ah, there she is, the one that had that oper-
ation, that famous trans woman” . . . Sometimes I question this . . . I
don’t know if it’s going to help me, but I do know that it will help
others, those that are coming behind us. (Mariana, May 2009)
In other words, even despite her political drive and her acknow-
ledgment of the need for change and that few others were willing
to undertake such a stance for fear of being ostracized, she wished
78 Penny Miles
to be able to “pass.” Her instinctive response was to want to con-

form to the dominant norms of society, not challenge them on a
personal level. It points to what the costs of “coming out” mean
to her. Stychin (1998) has remarked on the paradox of members of
LGBTI communities in having to come out in order to challenge
one’s rights and raise awareness.
Both Emmanuel and Mauricio favored “passing,” which was
not just driven by financial reasons, but was related to wanting to
reject the past and begin a “new life.” Emmanuel goes so far as
to consider the ability to access a new ID card as official recogni-
tion of his “rebirth” (Emmanuel, May 2009). Living as an openly
trans person in the Chilean society of the late 2000s and ques-
tioning the gender binaries was precisely the situation that they
were trying to avoid by securing an ID card that represented their
adopted gender identity. Having been excluded by and discrimi-
nated against in the workplace, education establishments, banks,
hospitals, and so on, on the basis of crossing and challenging the
gender binary, the pressure to conform from society becomes an
influential determinant in wanting to conform to the dominant
norms. So while the judicial rulings themselves may be transgres-
sive, the outcomes do not necessarily reflect that transgression.
The direct benefits of legal change for some may not lead to direct
benefits for a more transgressive gender politics.
Despite this, a third direct benefit of legal change can be iden-
tified in the increased volume of petitions and activism. Media
dissemination has served to expand trans male organization mem-
bership and to give exposure to what is legally possible in relation
to achieving gender recognition. The visibility of Andrés’s case, not
least within the broader LGBTI community, served as the impetus
for another organization, the Homosexual MOVILH to sponsor,
cojointly with the UDP’s public interest litigation clinic six such
petitions for trans women in June 2007. Further such petitions
have been presented through splinter groups formerly incorpo-
rated into the OTD, the GAHT, and AADGE. AADGE sought
legal representation through the Human Rights Office affiliated
to the state-sponsored Legal Aid Corporation, and GAHT pur-
sued one case in conjunction with a lawyer hired privately, but has
since associated itself with the legal clinic based at the University
of Chile. In all of those petitions presented, either name or gender
and name changes are sought where GRS has not been performed.
In some instances, it is the centrality of the legal action that has

become the main focus of activism.
Whilst Andrés’s case was given exposure through the OTD
website, MOVILH took a more direct approach with the media
and was able to draw on its already established links with both
print and visual media. As a consequence of the petitions presented
by MOVILH and the UDP, both MOVILH activists and UDP
lawyer, Mayra Feddersen, reported having been approached by
individuals and lawyers wishing to undertake the same legal pro-
cess. Some sought legal counsel and others just sought informa-
tion regarding the necessary steps to take. It was through the same
mechanisms that the intersex cases came to light. One individual
was directed to the Human Rights Office affiliated to the Legal
Aid Corporation by the UDP. Ironically, she was initially a former
UDP law student who had worked in the public interest litigation
clinic. Consequently, she decided to use and adapt the same for-
mat that the clinic had applied in the transgender cases. Juliana’s
case, a part of this research project, was taken by the UDP between
2008 and 2009. Lawyers’ willingness to embark on such courses
of action, and in this case, often in the public domain, has played a
central role in facilitating a more concerted level of legal activism.
The media attention achieved in certain cases, either in rela-
tion to the legal action brought, such as in the MOVILH/UDP
sponsored petitions, or the actual outcomes, such as those publi-
cized through OTD and GAHT websites, has facilitated activists’
ability to secure legal representation necessary to taking further
legal action. Furthermore, it has prompted others to present sim-
ilar cases. One important outcome of the rise in such petitions
being presented has been the growth and consolidation of actors
involved in mobilizing the petitions. Below I examine the increas-
ingly intersectional nature of activism in this context. Not only
does the legal process itself require the involvement of a number of
actors, such as psychologists, doctors, and lawyers, but as a conse-
quence of this heightened awareness of cases, more actors become
involved in the legal process. A greater number of lawyers have
been willing to take on cases, and different universities have been
willing to support these cases. In 2008, when this research began,
the UDP was the principal institution supporting more diverse
human rights issues, such as transgender rights. The same cause
has been taken up by the University of Chile since 2010.
80 Penny Miles
I ndirect Outcomes
I turn now to what McCann termed as the “indirect” outcomes of
legal action. He refers to these as the “centrifugal” or “radiating”
effects of legal mobilization or litigation strategies (1994). The
indirect outcomes have been important in enabling a more con-
certed litigation agenda in pursuing legal change for trans people
in Chile. For example, at the time of my fieldwork, of all cases
pertaining to LGBTI rights, by far the most numerous cases were
transgender petitions for legal recognition. At least one indirect
outcome of which was the growth in networks of knowledge and
legal support. These networks, or “associative capacity” (Gloppen,
2006), have been consolidated between claimants, movement
activists, and legal representatives. This has been central to pursu-
ing a litigious agenda in relation to trans identity rights.
As I argue elsewhere (Miles, 2011), the impediments to access-
ing the legal resources for members of LGBTI populations, and
especially trans populations, has been severely curtailed by the
dominance of stigma and deviancy discourses associated with sex-
ual orientation and gender identity that divert from the heterosex-
ual norm or cross the gender binary. Until recently, lawyers were
fearful of the “stigma contagion” (Kirby and Corzine, 1981) if
seen to represent members of these communities. In an interview,
Cristina L ópez exemplifies the difficulties in securing legal repre-
sentation in the case of a trans woman found dead at a well-known
chemist’s apartment in Santiago in 2002:
We didn’t have a lawyer. Such is the extent of their vulnerability,

that not even human rights lawyers, or at least back then, were
able to take on a case of this magnitude, because there is always
the issue that people want to read in between the lines, or you’re a
client, or your like trans, or there’s something wrong with you, so,
you can’t be normal. So we didn’t have a lawyer. One person had
offered to help from the Humanist Party, but then he let us down
so then we didn’t have one. (Cristina, June 2009)
Her emphasis on human rights lawyers taking on such cases relates

to the fact that most cases dealt with here and in my research more
generally have been undertaken by human rights lawyers intent on
questioning and broadening the concepts of democracy and citizen-
ship in their gendered, ethnic, class, and sexual biases. The language
of human rights has been a significant tool in advancing the rights

agendas of disenfranchised groups across Latin America. In the
aftermath of many brutal dictatorships experienced continent-wide,
it became a unifying language of struggle (Brown, 2002; Robles,
2008) and the means through which transitional justice processes
have been implemented across the region. The legal processes stud-
ied here are a product of the advances made in both the politi-
cal and judicial arenas, largely in the era following the Pinochet
arrest in 1998, which sparked international and national debate
concerning impunity for dictators and retribution for victims of
mass-perpetrated state abuse. Prior to his arrest, judicial responses
to such crimes seemed a distant reality. Domestically, the result of
the “Pinochet Effect” (Roht-Arriaza, 2006) saw a convergence of
political and judicial will to address the past human rights abuses.
Such developments have since paved the way for expanding the
remit of human rights into disability rights, LGBTI rights, gender
rights, migrant rights, among other issues (Richards, 2004; Robles,
2008). They are in their incipient stages of contestation, however,
and challenging the corporatist, hierarchical, conservative judicial
realm (Hilbink, 2007) is far from a rapid process.
In this context, therefore, claimants and movement activists
have sought legal representation with lawyers intent on advanc-
ing the human rights agenda. GAHT has links with progressive
lawyers in the University of Chile. Nadia, one of the lawyers there,
insisted that she was prepared to “take on any case that they need
me to take on” (Nadia, April 2010). The relationship between
MOVILH and the UDP has a long history and has covered legal
issues from across the LGBTI spectrum, though more recent cases
have seen better responses from the judiciary. OTD has taken cases
in conjunction with a local lawyer hired privately, and AADGE
has taken its cases to the Human Rights branch of the Legal Aid
Corporation. The willingness of these networks to work together
has facilitated the presentation of further petitions for those trans
individuals undergoing transition and seeking to acquire the legal
recognition of their adopted gender.
Furthermore, as the relations become more established, law-
yers’ expertise in the area increased. There is a greater willingness
to undertake more extensive research on the area, which has led
to more innovative petitions being presented, such as those pre-
sented by the University of Chile who seek to achieve the petitions
82 Penny Miles
without individuals being subjected to degrading examinations at

the Medical Legal Service. In maximizing the petitions presented,
judges are asked increasingly to respond to the problem at hand.
This serves to sensitize members of the judiciary to trans issues
and to question the prevailing legal culture.
This growth in associative capacity extends to professionals
from psychological and psychiatric backgrounds expanding their
expertise in the area of transgenderism and to sensitizing medical
doctors to treating patients with dignity. In Rancagua, Andrés has
gone through the process of securing doctors to perform mastec-
tomies or hysterectomies, or to provide the necessary hormones,
and psychologists to provide reports that confirm transsexualism.
This has meant that he has helped create a network of profession-
als that other members of OTD are able to draw on when they
come to undergo transitions. In a similar manner, UDP lawyer,
Mayra Feddersen and MOVILH president, Rolando Jiménez,
challenged the practices of medical doctors at the Medical Legal
Service requested by judges to perform physical examinations of
claimants, given the extremely degrading circumstances to which
the latter were subjected. Though it seems that practices did not
change even following a response from the Service’s director, at
least the initiative brought these practices to light.
This shift from individually held resources to maximizing the
collective potential by increasing networks into multiple domains,
such as medical, legal, and activist has emerged in parallel to the
growth and consolidation of trans (male) groups. During fieldwork
it became apparent that parallel processes were occurring as each
group created its own legal documents and strategies in isolation
from other groups. Claimants and groups might well have benefited
from combining both legal and practical strategies, such as using
testimony with judicial officials. Some of these parallel processes
existed in part due to the personal, political, and ideological antago-
nisms of those that comprised the trans movement in Chile. For
example, some lawyers were not inclined to approach other law-
yers or other trans organizations regarding strategy-sharing even to
maximize understanding or expertise levels. These counterexamples
appeared to be in the minority and from the evidence presented
above, one clear indirect benefit of litigation has been an increasing
capacity of building and working across networks that have contrib-
uted to the development of the LGBTI movement in Chile.
C onclusions
The legal mobilization strategies being employed by trans and
LGBTI activists are beginning to challenge the extensive exclu-
sion and marginalization faced by Chilean trans populations. This
search for social justice has been forced through necessity as a
means of remedying the divergence between legal and lived iden-
tities. The excessive reliance on ID cards in regulating Chilean
daily life—in education, banks, employment, and so forth—has
led an increasing number of trans men and women to seek gender
recognition through the courts. Legal mobilization strategies are
concerned with both direct and indirect outcomes, and in this
instance, these differing sets of outcomes are interlinking. The
direct outcomes are impacting on the indirect outcomes, with
multiple repercussions at individual and collective levels.
Direct outcomes essentially equate to the favorable rulings
achieved. This chapter focuses on those obtained since 2007, as
they have recognized trans identities without individuals having to
undergo gender reassignment surgery. Andrés Rivera’s landmark
case, which achieved name and gender recognition without under-
going sex change surgery, set a precedent that uncoupled gender
recognition from the body. As a consequence, more individuals
have attempted to present similar petitions to the courts, as aware-
ness regarding what is legally possible for transgender populations
regarding recognition increases. There has been a clear departure
from the past in these new petitions. Whereas previously cases
would only be presented where GRS had been performed, access
is now widening to those who have not necessarily undergone this
surgery. This has financial and political implications. These legal
proceedings were only essentially open to those with the finan-
cial resources and personal inclination to undergo genital reas-
signment surgery. By reducing the financial burden and increasing
the diversity of demands that can be presented, such as for name
change only, or by attempting to secure both name and gender
changes without recourse to GRS, the possibilities have expanded
greatly for trans populations in Chile.
However, these cases are being contested in courts in a civil
law system where precedents are not officially recognized, and
where cases are subject to legal interpretation. The variance in
outcomes of rulings have meant that a situation is emerging of dif-
ferentiated citizenship, as different trans individuals are obtaining
84 Penny Miles
differentiated access to name and/or gender change. The gen-

dered nature of that divide is clear, as trans men more readily
access a greater level of legal entitlement in relation to recogni-
tion. Although both populations are far from embodying Chilean
notions of hegemonic masculinity, trans males are able to capital-
ize on the patriarchal dividend (Connell, 1995, 80–82), which
facilitates a greater level of insertion into Chilean society post-
transition. The transgressive potential implicit in the actual juris-
prudence is rarely lived out in practice, as in the case of Andrés.
Most who obtain favorable rulings prefer to pass and reaffirm the
gender binaries, such is the pressure from Chilean society to con-
form to the male/female binary.
However, indirectly these legal mobilization processes have been
highly influential for trans movement consolidation, and for more
concerted intersectional activism. The requirements of these legal
cases calls for the participation of a number of key actors, such as
lawyers and legal scholars, medical and health professionals, to a
greater or lesser degree. The fact that some of these cases have been
pursued in the public interest by lawyers and academics involved
in public interest litigation strategies has also placed great empha-
sis on the role of the media. It, therefore, has played a central
role in this process in both raising awareness around trans male
identities principally and also in disseminating notions of what is
legally possible in relation to trans recognition. Such visibility has
increased trans organization membership and has prompted the
subsequent expansion and diversification of the trans male groups
and has reinforced a more concerted focus on litigation as a means
of advancing trans rights in Chile.
This points to the role played by actors outside of the trans and
LGBTI movement and the intersectional nature of activism pur-
sued in this context. Not only have lawyers have been instrumental
to ensuring that petitions can be presented with sufficient fre-
quency and expertise, but medical professionals must also negoti-
ate the stigma contagion to deal effectively and sensitively to these
cases. As the piece intimates, overcoming such stigmatizing dis-
courses is not a straightforward process in those areas of law and
medicine where concepts of hegemonic masculinity will be more
closely played out. The growth of these networks then provides a
stronger platform from which to continue the legal strategies to
effect yet greater outcomes. One other important outcome, which
is touched upon in this chapter, is that the same legal framework is

being applied to intersex cases.
Overall this discussion, which centers on the growth of trans-
gender petitions for recognition and the resulting differentiated
levels of citizenship, which are emerging as a consequence, points
to the need for effective policy in this area (Universidad Diego
Portales, 2009, 2010). The expanding expertise on the subject
matter in legal and medical domains, more expansive jurispru-
dence on recognition, and examples of gender recognition laws,
such as the Uruguay 2009 law, all serve as points of departure for
a more considered approach to the issue in Chile. The recognition
of gender identity as a protected category in the antidiscrimina-
tion bill passed in November 2011 will go some way to providing
greater leverage for legal recognition for Chilean trans people.
Notes
1. All translations are the author’s own. Identities have been made
anonymous, with the exception of the activists who wish to be
recognized.
2. Currah, Juang, and Minter note: “Since about 2005, the meaning of
transgender has begun to settle, and the term is now generally used
to refer to individuals whose gender identity or expression does not
conform to the social expectations for their assigned sex at birth”
(2006, xiv). In the Chilean context, trans identities are contested
personally and ideologically. At the time the research was conducted,
there was a lack of consensus on the use of the term in its political
sense, and self-identification varied across the trans spectrum. The
term “trans,” however, was more acceptable as an umbrella term in
the original Spanish.
3. Preoperative refers to someone that has not undergone genital
reassignment surgery, though may have undergone other surgical
procedures. Postoperative transsexuals have undergone genital reas-
signment surgery (Sharpe, 2002).
4. Mauro Cabral’s collection (2009) goes some way to opening the dis-
cussion on intersexuality in the Latin American context and in the
Spanish language. I use LGBT here as opposed to LGBTI because
the organizations themselves do not include the “I,” and the “B”
also remains invisible within the movement. I include it in my gen-
eral usage so as not to contribute further to the invisibility.
5. The Medical Legal Service handles all the medical procedures required
by the judiciary, such as forensics, postmortems, and so forth.
86 Penny Miles
6. Ley No 17.344. Published in Diario Oficial, Santiago, September 22,

1970.
7. Historically, neither organization has included the “I” in the acro-
nym. There has been a shift toward using more inclusive terminology
such as sexual diversity. See www.mums.cl, www.movilh.cl.
8. During fieldwork, 2008 and 2010, given the extent of the prevailing
social sanctions, accessing cases was achieved largely through word
of mouth. I engaged with lawyers, movement activists, friendship
networks from within the LGBTI movement in order to achieve
this. I acknowledge that there may have been other similar cases
that I may not have been able to access as a result. Moreover, given
the highly sensitive nature of the research, accessing those that were
engaging in litigation in the public domain posed fewer ethical
dilemmas.
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4
I n t e r nat iona l A dop t ion a s

Hu m a n i ta r i a n A i d: Th e
Disc u r si v e a n d M at e r i a l
P roduc t ion of t h e “S oc i a l
Or ph a n” i n H a i t i a n
Dis a st e r R e l i e f
Kate Livingston
S cientific analyses of “natural” disasters consider the interplay

of multiple relationships between ever-evolving processes: meteo-
rological conditions, geological forces, population density, infra-
structure, institutional preparedness, individual and community
responses, among other factors. In order to understand natural
disasters and their widespread impact, scholars in physical and social
sciences utilize multiple levels of analysis to consider the ways in
which natural and social landscapes are coconstructed in relation
to each other. While disaster events such as earthquakes, floods,
and hurricanes certainly shape the future of these landscapes,
political and cultural histories also influence the way these events
are experienced by individuals and communities. Intersectionality
has thus emerged as an important methodological tool for explor-
ing the social, political, and economic dimensions of these events.
A critical theory concerned with illuminating the operation and
production of power, intersectionality considers how identity cat-
egories are constituted through cultural discourse, institutional
processes, and political structures in ways that produce inequality,
90 K at e L i v i ng s t on
privilege, and marginalization. Within an intersectional frame-

work, identity categories are understood as constructs imbedded
with discursive and material histories that reflect relationships
among people and social institutions. As Wendy Smooth explains
in this volume, feminist scholarship across a wide range of disci-
plines has long emphasized the role of intersectionality in chal-
lenging essentialized understandings of individual experience and
monolithic constructions of group identity. However, Smooth
argues, in chapter 1, that new uses of intersectionality in the fields
of political science and policy analysis can build on these founda-
tions to “gain greater balance between the individual and struc-
tural levels of analysis” (25). Recent studies of Hurricane Katrina
in the social sciences serve as an example of new research that
illustrates the particular contributions of policy studies to inter-
sectionality scholarship. Scholars have advanced the intersectional
paradigm as a way to examine how preexisting hierarchies of race,
class, gender, ability, age, and sexuality produced disparate vul-
nerabilities and unequal outcomes for Gulf Coast communities
affected by the storm (Chester and Squires, 2006; Weber and
Masias, 2012). Notably, these works incorporate a structural analy-
sis of post-Katrina disaster relief, exploring, as Smooth suggests in
chapter 1, “how institutions and political structures give mean-
ing to identities and structure the relationships between social
identity groups” (14). Weber and Mesias’s intersectional research
on the experiences of post-Katrina recovery workers explores how
the responses of government, nonprofit, and business institutions
shaped the trajectory of recovery efforts along the Mississippi coast.
Institutional policies and practices impacted health outcomes for
recovery workers themselves, yet these volunteers also played a key
role in proliferating recovery programs that ultimately produced
raced, classed, and gendered health outcomes for Mississippi Gulf
communities. Intersectionality is used as a framework to examine
the ways in which the experiences of recovery workers and their
roles in Gulf communities were constituted by government, non-
profit, and corporate responses that drew from and exacerbated
preexisting hierarchies of power.
This chapter contributes to the growing body of disaster relief
studies that uses intersectionality to explore the linkages between
micro-level experience and institutional processes. In this project,
I use an intersectional lens to examine how the push for expedited
I n t e r n a t ion a l A d op t ion a s Hu m a n i t a r i a n A i d 91
international adoption as a form of humanitarian aid functions at

the discursive and material levels to construct the “social orphan”
as a subject of disaster relief intervention. Whereas the popular
definition of “orphan” once referred to children who had no living
relatives, the category of social orphan is now defined by nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) as homeless, displaced, impover-
ished, and/or parentless (but not necessarily relative-less) children.
Using the 2010 earthquake in Haiti as a case study, I argue that
the Haitian social orphan is a political category underwritten by
media representations of the Haitian body/family/country as
barbaric and unsafe while contrasting Western bodies/families/
countries as normative, modern, and stable. Drawing from Melissa
Wright’s discussion of “Third World” women and the role of myth
in supporting structural gender inequalities, I suggest that the dis-
cursive construction of the Haitian social orphan facilitates the
material transfer of Haitian children into a “waiting” global adop-
tion economy. Through textual and discursive analysis of news
media coverage of Haitian children in the months following the
earthquake, I outline the popular push for expedited international
adoption as a form of disaster “relief.” I then analyze two consti-
tutive dimensions of the social orphan category using an intersec-
tional lens: first, the myth that Haitian youth are representative
of a “global crisis in care” and second, the assertion that Haitian
youth are “at risk” if they remain in their homeland. By bridging
discursive and structural analysis, my goal is to demonstrate how
this political category is produced by raced, classed, and gendered
processes that engender and maintain hierarchical relationships
among groups. Intersectionality serves as a framework for under-
standing how these power differentials function at the micro level
to impact the experiences of individuals and groups at the same
time as they operate at the macro and global levels to structure
relationships between nations.
P opular Demands and Political Responses:

Adoption As Disaster Relief
As the world braced for the details of the devastation caused by
the massive 7.0 earthquake that shook Haiti on January 12, 2010,
the international community mobilized to provide humanitarian
aid to the millions of displaced citizens in and around the nation’s
capital of Port-au-Prince. While world leaders, NGOs, and private

citizens worldwide pledged their support, the logistical challenge
of implementing recovery efforts in Haiti became immediately
apparent. Food and water shortages, lack of infrastructure, and
the effects of a crippled national government quickly overwhelmed
multilateral medical and humanitarian relief efforts. In the months
that followed, Port-au-Prince’s decimated urban infrastructure ini-
tially yielded a reported 230,000 casualties, and was projected to
be “the most destructive natural disaster in modern times” (Lacey,
“Quake,” 2010).1 Through images and narratives of Haitian sur-
vivors, the international news media aided relief efforts by raising
both public awareness of the devastation and publicizing ways that
the public could contribute to the effort. While news coverage of
the earthquake fostered compassionate outreach via monetary and
in-kind donations, these visual and narrative mediations almost
immediately catalyzed a push toward a controversial approach to
outreach: international adoption.
Central to the initial coverage of international adoption in Haiti
were prospective adoptive parents who were already in the process
of adopting children from Haiti. Within a week of the earthquake,
US media began to cover story after story of prospective adoptive
parents frantic to find out if “their” Haitian child had survived
the earthquake.2 As stories publicized the plight of both the wait-
ing Haitian orphan and the uncertainty faced by waiting adoptive
parents in the United States, demands for the expedited adoption
of Haitian children into the United States reached a fever pitch.3
The US Department of State and the Department of Homeland
Security announced on January 18 that humanitarian parole would
be extended to approximately 1,000 Haitian orphans whose
adoptions were legally pending prior to the earthquake (Thomas,
2010). That same day, 53 Haitian orphans under humanitarian
parole were personally accompanied by Pennsylvania governor
Ed Rendell on a flight to Pittsburgh. A second major flight left
Haiti for Florida three days later. Countries such as France and
the Netherlands soon followed suit, expediting their international
adoption processes and exporting Haitian orphans to join wait-
ing adoptive families in Europe (Jordan, 2010; McKensei, 2010;
Reid, 2010).
While news of international humanitarian parole implied that
some Haitian orphans would be united with their waiting parents
in the United States, questions remained about the fate of the chil-
dren that remained in and around Haiti’s crippled capital. Many
groups argued that the devastation in Port-au-Prince might make
it impossible to obtain the documentation necessary to prove that
an adoption had been pending prior to the earthquake. At the
request of their constituents, a bipartisan coalition of 34 sena-
tors urged Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to con-
tinue to move forward with attempts to locate pending Haitian
adoptees and to allow for alternative eligibility procedures in the
event of lost or destroyed adoption documentation (Menendez,
2010). News reports also cautioned that unaccompanied minors
faced the threat of human trafficking into sexual slavery, black
market adoption, and domestic servitude4, leading many to argue
that the international community should intensify efforts to bring
Haitian “orphans” into some measure of protective custody.5 As
news coverage increasingly began to focus on the uncertain fate
of the children remaining in Haiti, the US State Department,
adoption facilitators, and charitable organizations were inundated
with inquiries from prospective adoptive parents seeking to adopt
Haitian children (Bazar and Kock, 2010). International organi-
zations such as the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
moved quickly to oppose new adoptions on the grounds that fam-
ily preservation should be the top priority of humanitarian efforts
and that facilitating international adoptions in a time of crisis
would expose children to an even greater risk for trafficking and
exploitation (McKenzie, 2010).
The debate over international adoption as a form of humanitar-
ian aid intensified when 10 Baptist missionaries from Boise, Idaho,
were jailed by Haitian authorities for attempting to extricate 33
orphans to the Dominican Republic just three days after the
Haitian government issued a moratorium on international adop-
tions (Kalson, 2010). The group, led by Laura Silsby, was charged
with kidnapping for failing to have appropriate documentation for
the children and further investigation revealed that the majority of
children had living parents who were promised by Silsby that their
children would be moved to safety (“Parents,” 2010). However,
Silsby’s website stated that children rescued by her organization
would “be eligible for adoption through agencies in the United
States” (Lacey, “Abduction,” 2010). The arrest of the missionar-
ies thus intensified an already heated public debate over whether
international adoption served the needs of the Haitian commu-

nity, or simply catered to the desires of Western nations.
S ocial Orphans and the Global

Crisis in Care
News stories about Haiti’s vulnerable children repeatedly cited
UNICEF figures that over 380,000 orphans existed in Haiti
prior to the earthquake. As the reported death toll rose to over
200,000 in the months after the quake, the implication was that
Haiti’s orphan population would swell exponentially. However,
UNICEF’s definition of social orphan encompasses children who
have lost one or more parents (to desertion or death), including
those that live with extended relatives (UNICEF, 2010). UNICEF
acknowledges that this expanded definition (which implies
132 million orphans worldwide) may influence public policy in
terms of humanitarian relief, but has cautioned the international
community not to make the uncritical assumption that all persons
designated orphans within its definition need new families.6 While
some reports on the Haitian disaster specified that approximately
half of Haiti’s reported 380,000 orphans had one living parent,
others continued to proliferate the larger number without qualifi-
cation (McCray, 2010; Jordan, 2010).
Coupled with the compelling images of orphans proliferated by
the news media, these statistics undoubtedly created for the view-
ing public a crisis in care of global proportions. Indeed, as news
reports proliferated, a growing concern was that Haiti’s orphan
population would be destined to languish in public institutions or
on the streets, offending American middle-class notions of a sta-
ble childhood (“Arrests,” 2010). This construction falls squarely
within popular narratives of international adoption that construct
the orphan as a very young, readily adoptable child threatened
with institutionalization or homelessness. The assumption that
millions of otherwise adoptable children might languishing in
institutions due to a global crisis in care has both fueled and jus-
tified American interest in international adoption. International
adoption has increased exponentially since the mid-1990s—from
22,200 in 1995 to a record of 45,000 in 2004; US adoptions con-
sistently account for approximately half of all international adop-
tions each year (Graff, 2008).
However, the majority of orphans are not, in fact, very young

children threatened with institutionalization. Officials from
UNICEF have refuted the notion that there are large numbers of
healthy infants in need of families through international adoption
(Graff, 2008). In contrast, only 10 percent of the 132 million chil-
dren designated orphans by the UNICEF definition have lost both
parents, and most live with extended relatives. Further, UNICEF
estimates that 95 percent of orphans are older than five, challeng-
ing the popular construction of the orphan as “the infant threat-
ened with institutionalization.”7 Critics of international adoption
as “humanitarian aid” have thus argued that international adop-
tion is driven by prospective adoptive parents’ demand for healthy
infants, rather than the overwhelming supply-side need implied by
the traditional meaning of the category “orphan.”
S ocial Orphans “At Risk”

Just as the category of social orphan positions international adop-
tion as a solution to a presumed global crisis in care, it similarly
positions adoption as a way to “protect” children from certain
forms of risk. The notion that adoption mitigates risk has a long
history in the United States, as evidenced in both international and
domestic adoption initiatives. Two well-documented examples,
Operation Babylift and Operation Pedro Pan, were constructed in
the US media as relocation efforts designed to mitigate children’s
risk in the face of national crisis. At the close of the Vietnam War
in 1975, President Gerald Ford authorized the mass evacuation of
approximately 3,000 Vietnamese children into the United States
for adoption by US citizens. While there was an outpouring of
interest by American families in these children, critics argued that
this effort, known as Operation Babylift, amounted to no more
than a publicity stunt designed to mitigate the criticisms of the
Vietnam War. Later investigation revealed that the children had
not been legally vetted as eligible for adoption. Indeed, many of
them were not orphans (Bergquist, 2009). In Operation Pedro
Pan, over 14,000 children were surreptitiously evacuated from
Cuba to Miami from 1973 to 1980. A joint project between the
Catholic Welfare Bureau and the US government, Operation Pedro
Pan sought to mitigate the threat of communist indoctrination
of Cuban youth under Fidel Castro. Cuban youth were placed in
foster homes and orphanages throughout the United States. While

some children were reunited with their Cuban parents within
months, other parents never made it out of Cuba and were sepa-
rated from their children for decades (Yanez, 2009). While these
efforts demonstrate the ways in which American political institu-
tions advance adoption as a solution for risk, this phenomenon
is certainly neither limited to state actors nor is it limited to US
involvement. In the 2007 case known as Zoe’s Ark, an unauthor-
ized French NGO attempted to extract 103 orphans out of war-
torn Darfur for export to waiting families in France and Denmark.
The group was arrested for kidnapping, but maintained they were
simply fulfilling a moral imperative to rescue children from a crisis
situation. Later investigation revealed that the children were not
orphans, rather had been obtained from their families under false
pretenses (Bergquist, 2009).
US approaches to domestic adoption echo a similar commit-
ment to resolving risk through the adoption of children into
“safer” communities. Formal legal domestic adoption as it exists
today in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior
to the first state domestic adoption law in 1851, adoption existed
in various informal and nonstandardized incarnations (Cahn,
2004). Historian E. Wayne Carp (1998) argues that in the mid-
nineteenth century, increased immigration and industrialization
in the United States resulted in social and economic changes
that brought new national attention to the issue of child welfare.
Growing poverty across the country contributed to a change in
national sentiment that saw children’s health and development as
matters of public welfare and national stability, ushering in new
era of legal and social welfare reform (Carp, 1998). Prior to 1850,
typical approaches to child welfare involved the placement of needy
children into almshouses that served to isolate a wide range of pub-
lic “scourges” from society. Needy children, the elderly, mentally
ill, and medically fragile persons of all ages were housed together
in neglected public institutions, a practice later condemned by
mid-century social reformers as barbaric, unsafe, and contributing
to the degeneracy of minors (Gordon, 2001).
The first alternatives that emerged in the United States were
institutions that exclusively served orphans. The period between
1800 and 1850 saw an increase of 164 orphanages in the United
States, followed by an additional 75 between 1850 and 1870
(Carp, 1998). During the mid-1800s, a rapid influx of children

into such institutions threatened the financial and logistical capac-
ities of many urban centers. Historian Linda Gordon argues that
many children served by orphan asylums were actually children of
single mothers who turned to institutions as a foster care option
in the face of poverty. While many mothers initially saw asylums
as temporary relief, often they were unable to pull themselves
out of poverty and left their children as permanent institutional
wards (Gordon, 2001). In addition, though many children were
orphaned or abandoned, new public “child-saving” discourses
greatly contributed to the influx of children into the burgeoning
child welfare system.
The ideological position of American social reformers such as
Charles Loring Brace often conflated the tragic effects of urban
poverty with those of parental neglect. Founder of New York’s
Children’s Aid Society (est. 1853), Brace advanced a construction
of child welfare steeped in the Protestant work ethic (Carp, 1998).
He argued that street children were victims of not only poverty,
but also of an unstructured and unstable lifestyle caused primarily
by a lack of proper parenting. Such children could be reformed by
bringing them into a child welfare system that would give them
education, religious training, and a chance for a “normal” family
life. Children’s Aid Society agents routinely canvassed New York
slums, seizing poor children under the auspices of “child-saving”—
regardless of whether or not the children were actually orphans.
Brace championed a new child welfare model that sought to both
transform poor children into productive, moral citizens and allevi-
ate the financial and logistical strain caused by the increased num-
ber of children being brought into institutional care (Gordon,
2001). The Children’s Aid Society instituted a national “orphan
train” that shipped thousands of urban children from the East to
Protestant foster homes in the West. By 1910, Brace’s orphan train
had “placed out” over 110,000 children since it began in 1854
(Gordon, 2001).
Linda Gordon (2001) notes that the policies and practices of
the Children’s Aid Society were racist and classist in their assump-
tions of what constituted “proper upbringing.” An Ivy-League-
educated Protestant minister, Brace represented the interests
of New York’s Protestant elite, while the children he sought to
“save” were largely from the city’s growing Catholic immigrant
population. New York’s Catholic communities saw Brace’s efforts

as rooted in religious and ethnic bias, a genocidal attempt to
indoctrinate working-class Catholic youth with the values of the
Protestant elite. In response, Catholic religious and charitable
institutions rapidly developed their own child welfare programs,
including their own orphan train operations.
Similar mediations of adoption and risk can be found in
American news stories after the Haitian earthquake about the
particular vulnerabilities of children in and around the fault zone.
Frequently reported figures estimated that approximately 2,000
Haitian children were trafficked each year into sexual slavery,
black market adoption, and domestic servitude before the earth-
quake (Block and Siegel, 2010). Fears that unaccompanied chil-
dren would be swept into a preexisting informal human economy
alarmed an international public desperate to “rescue” these vul-
nerable youth. While the risk of human trafficking dominated
public discourse on the risks faced by Haitian children, these nar-
ratives were bolstered by other manifestations of risk. Generalized
international concern about trafficking was heightened by reports
of looting. Gangs of thieves reportedly threatened to undermine
orphan relief efforts by stealing supplies destined for orphan-
ages (LaFranchi, 2010). Many reports pointed to the inability
of Haitian families to care for their own children, an issue pub-
licized by the revelation that many of the children involved in
the Baptist missionary kidnapping case were handed over to the
missionaries by desperate parents (LaFranchi, 2010). Still other
reports advanced the notion of voluntary neglect by Haitian fami-
lies. An adoption facilitator in Haiti, a proponent of international
adoption, reported that children in her orphanage were initially
found discarded among trash, while another child was reported
disabled as a result of her birth mothers’ failed abortion attempt
(LaFranchi, 2010). Such coverage contrasted with reports of the
white, Western families with “Haiti in their hearts,” “eager to
embrace” Haitian orphans and bring them into the safety of their
“loving homes” (McCray, 2010; Bazar and Kock, 2010; “Arrests,”
2010). Like Brace’s orphan train operations, these mediations are
embedded with racialized, gendered, and classed understandings
of child-rearing and safety that work to categorize children with
living relatives as orphans.
Constructing the Social Orphan

Through Discursive Processes and
Institutional Practices
Melissa Wright’s (2006) work on the role of myth in maintaining
structural inequalities provides a model for understanding how
the category of social orphan is enabled through both discursive
and institutional processes. Wright argues that a global “myth of
the disposable Third World woman” works as a discursive con-
struction that underwrites capitalist exploitation of women’s
labor (Wright, 2006, 1). This discursive construction is materially
instructive in normalizing certain expectations for the treatment
of women workers within global capitalism, despite the fact that
the myth is a fictional composite character. For example, although
women’s labor in global factories is often highly skilled, the myth
posits workers as unskilled and interchangeable. Wright suggests
that the myth that workers have a natural labor life cycle affirms
existing hierarchical relations of power wherein women workers are
treated as disposable (2006). Thus, the myth is a discursive con-
struction that supports classed and gendered practices to produce
material inequalities. I argue that the construction of the social
orphan as a political category in Haitian disaster relief discourses
supports hierarchical institutional practices in much the same way
as Wright’s myth of the disposable woman. As a political category,
the social orphan comes into view as the subject of policy interven-
tion through political and social processes engaged by state struc-
tures, NGOs, and public discourse (Parr, 2009). Intersectional
analysis enables us to trace these discursive and structural linkages
to examine how state and NGOs draw from constructions of a
global crisis in care and at-risk children to help mobilize the social
orphan category.
Even as NGOs such as UNICEF attempted to qualify the terms
of the category as inclusive of children with living parents, visual and
narrative representations of social orphans continued to reinforce the
myth that untold numbers of children would be consigned to a risky
life of abandonment without US intervention. As seen in the priori-
tizing of international adoption out of Haiti by the US Department
of State, political structures and institutions also engaged with
these representations and mobilized relief efforts in response. Both
before and after the earthquake, Haiti was represented as unable
to secure the safety and stability of its children. The category of

Haitian social orphan is thus reinforced by and embedded within
a larger discourse on Haitian “otherness”—wherein public anxiety
about Haitian children’s vulnerability to human trafficking posi-
tions adult Haitian survivors as the immoral, deviant other within
hegemonic discourses of Western colonial morality (Parr, 2009,
114). Public discourses on “risk” implicitly and explicitly construct
Haitians as the uncivilized other “within middle-class standards of
morality” (Parr, 2009, 114). News coverage characterizes the white,
Western, middle-class mother/family/country as selfless, generous,
and stable, while positing Haitian mothers/families/country as des-
perate, opportunistic, and negligent (if not murderous). Even when
the integrity of the Western-as-normative construction is called into
question, public discourse still leaves room for the possibility that
deviation from the norm is but an aberration—a misunderstanding.
For example, the ten Baptist missionaries were roundly chastised
by the media; furor erupted when Laura Silsby was discovered to
have a potential profit motive (she was bankrupt) and that her legal
representation in Haiti was wanted by El Salvadorian authorities on
charges of child sex trafficking (Lacey and Urbina, 2010). However,
the news media still considered the possibility that the missionaries
had simply “forgot(ten) about some requites” and that “their inten-
tions were always to help” (Jordan and Gaulthier-Villars, 2010).
Similarly, when immigration reviews revealed that many of the
orphans on Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell’s highly publicized
humanitarian parolee exodus were not actually orphans, Rendell’s
publicist justified the oversight as occurring within a “fog of war
situation” and claimed that government officials assumed they were
all orphans (Roche, 2010).
This is particularly interesting when viewed in light of the
discourse on Haitian child trafficking and the practice of child
domestic servitude. In addition to fears of child sexual slavery,
news media focused on the plight of Haitian restaveks —children
sold or placed into families as indentured domestic servants. While
US officials designate the practice as child slavery, others argue that
within the Haitian community the practice is sometimes under-
stood as an informal foster care network. While the risk of abuse
and sexual exploitation is documented, the practice is defended
by some Haitians who see it as a viable option for children who
would otherwise have no way to survive (Kay, 2007). The power to
designate this practice as child slavery and to mitigate the actions

of Americans as aberrations and mistakes reveals the extent to
which the construction of risk works to legitimize Western colo-
nial morality. Aside from the total foreclosure of the possibility
that the practice could constitute a local structure of care, the des-
ignation of “child slavery” obscures the extent to which Americans
themselves are implicated in the practice. The distinction made
within the discourse between “child trafficker” and “hapless well-
intentioned humanitarian” positions Haitian women/families/
country as the deviant “other,” while masking the inequalities
produced by Western racism and neoliberalism that frame the eco-
nomic conditions of Haitians that turn to restavek practices.
The category of social orphan signals what Adrian Parr theorizes
in sustainability discourse as “the distinction between waste, recy-
cling and downcycling . . . that determines whether a subject will
count within the norms of a given society” (Parr, 2009, 102). If
Haiti was considered dangerous and unable to secure the safety
of its children, social orphans are constructed as “recyclable” chil-
dren of “disposable Third World” Haitian women within disaster
relief discourse. This distinction is made, in part, because of the
high surplus value of Haitian children in preexisting international
adoption economies, driven almost entirely by Western demand for
adoptable infants. Inscribed within the terms of the category, the
social orphan is represented as a symptom of a larger global crisis in
care, under which the international community mobilizes to locate
more children able to be “recycled” from their otherwise “dispos-
able” women/families/countries of origin (Butler, 1993, 3). This
is a discursive and institutional process that produces children for
adoption as an effect of defining the social orphan. That is, racial-
ized, classed, and gendered understandings of safe children and
families are institutionalized through the political processes that
give meaning to the term social orphan. This identity category is
mobilized by states and NGOs through humanitarian disaster relief
programs, bringing children into the domain of international adop-
tion economies where they are removed, in the name of the social
orphan, from families and countries of origin. Thus, this discourse
has material effects in that it signifies Haitian children’s availability
for adoption by US citizens and, ironically, facilitates their traf-
ficking as commodities within international adoption economies—
albeit within a racialized child-saving moral framework.
The material, economic implications of this global discursive

construction are most clearly illustrated in the investigative report-
ing of E. J. Graff (2008) on the case of Guatemala, the second
most popular provider of adopted children into the United States
from 2006 to 2007. In response to allegations of child traffick-
ing in Guatemala, UNICEF (in conjunction with the Guatemalan
government) conducted a survey of Guatemalan orphanages
in 2007 that estimated the population of children within such
institutions at 5,600. Only 1,000 of the population were age
3 or under, with approximately 400 children under a year old.
Astonishingly, UNICEF found that over 270 Guatemalan babies
(under 12 months) were being adopted into the United States each
month. According to published reports, 1 out of 110 Guatemalan
babies were exported to the United States in 2006. The high mar-
ket value of healthy babies propelled an international adoption
economy that was rooted in corruption, kidnapping, and coer-
cion. The Hague Conference on Private International Law found
that adoption facilitators in Guatemala could earn double the
average local yearly wage for procuring just one infant for export
to the United States. The situation in Guatemala is not isolated;
similar findings have been reported in other countries, including
Cambodia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, which is the second-ranked
child exporter to the United States in 2009 (Graff, 2008).
Intersectional analysis is useful in illuminating the ways in
which political categories are constructed through discourse to
privilege certain bodies, nations, groups over others—and how
political institutions develop and operationalize those categories
through policy responses. Embedded with raced, classed, and gen-
dered hierarchies of power, the category of social orphan promotes
institutional and state responses that prioritize “rescue” over pub-
lic policies designed to strengthen internal capacities (Rai, 2002).
Disaster narratives in visual and news media explored the extent to
which Haiti was an “uninhabitable” space for children both before
and after the earthquake. These narratives marginalize the care-
taking efforts of Haiti at the local and national levels and mobilize
the value-laden meanings embedded within in the social orphan
identification. As government and institutional responses engage
with these meanings in the constructions of disaster relief policies,
international adoption emerges as an institutional policy response
that promotes and maintains systems of inequality.
Notes
1. In the years following the earthquake, Haitian death toll numbers
have been disputed by social science researchers as highly inflated.
This overinflation supports the role of media, narrative, and myth
in constructing the “social orphan” through discourses of risk. For
examples of this critique see Kolbe and Hudson et al. “Mortality,
Crime and Access to Basic Needs before and after the Haiti
Earthquake: A Random Survey of Port-Au-Prince Households”
(2010).
2. ABC’s popular news magazine show Nightline featured the story
of a white Iowa couple desperate to hear any word about Haitian
girl who they were in the process of adopting. Fewer than a week
after the airing of the initial episode, ABC’s popular morning show
Good Morning America reported from Haiti that they had found the
young girl, safe but shaken, in her orphanage. See Emily Bazar and
Wendy Kock (2010) and Hinman (2010).
3. Michelle T. Bond, US deputy assistant secretary for Overseas
Citizens Services, assured prospective adoptive parents in a written
interview that the US Department of State considered the interests
of prospective adoptive parents with pending adoptions to be among
the department’s top priorities. See Interview with Michelle T. Bond
(2010).
4. Melissa Block and Robert Siegel, “Examining Adoptions from
Haiti,” interview with Juan Forero, All Things Considered, NPR
News, February 2, 2010.
5. London Times columnist Melanie Reid argued that in the midst of
crisis, a moral imperative to rescue orphaned children from immedi-
ate danger might override “the sophisticated post-colonial option”
of family preservation. Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard legal scholar
and well-known proponent of international adoption, argued that
“Haitian authorities should be trying to help a lot of kids get out [of
the country]—both the kids in the process of adoption and other
that appear not to have parents or relatives able to take care of them”.
See “Arrests Intensify Haiti Adoption Debate” (2010); Reid, (2010);
Fletcher (2010).
6. Definition of Orphan on UNICEF.org http://www.unicef.org/media
/media_45279.html (accessed March 1, 2010).
7. This overstatement of the supply of children available for adoption is
further illustrated by the fact that prospective adoptive parents face
long waiting lists for domestic and international placements. Even
in China, where restrictive population control policies have pro-
duced large numbers of girls available for adoption, the demand for
healthy infants far exceeds the available supply. According to critics,
the reality of the “crisis in care” is that most children in desperate

need of humanitarian assistance are older children, the disabled, and
those with medical issues, demographics decidedly not sought out by
prospective adoptive parents. See E. J. Graff’s “The Lie We Love,”
Foreign Policy, November 1, 2008.
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5
G e n de r e d Su bj e c t i v i t y a n d
I n t e r sec t iona l Pol i t ic a l
Age nc y i n Tr a nsnat ion a l Spac e:
Th e C a se of Tu r k ish a n d Ku r dish
Wom e n’s NG O Ac t i v ists
Anil Al-Rebholz
Too often, Western feminists have ignored the politics of reception

in the interpretation of texts from the so called peripheries, calling
for inclusion of “difference” by “making room” or “creating space”
without historicizing the relations of exchange that govern literacy,
the production and marketing of texts, the politics of editing and
distribution, and so on.
(Caren Kaplan, 1997, 139).
Every feminist struggle has a specific ethnic (as well as class) context.
(Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983, 62).
Emerging as the first oppositional social movement in Turkish

public sphere in the aftermath of Coup D’etat in 1980, second
wave feminism has undergone an important transformation pro-
cess in recent decades. Alongside the ideological differentiation
between radical and socialist feminists toward the end of 1980s,
starting with the 1990s, we can observe the widespread institu-
tionalization and “NGOization” of the movement. The transfor-
mation can also be seen in the extensive pluralization of women’s
groups and organizations. The variety and multiplicity of women’s
108 A n i l A l -R e bhol z
organizations is accompanied by the diversification of ideologies,

positions, perspectives, and traditions. In addition to ideological
and organizational diversification, the 1990s witnessed the geo-
graphical diffusion of feminist movement. Thus what began in
consciousness raising meetings of small groups of feminist women
in the cities of Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir) has spread to
the other places such as Diyarbakir, Bursa, Adana, Mersin, Van,
Eskisehir, Gaziantep, and Samsun (Kerestecioglu, 2004, 75). This
transitional period also saw the rise of local/regional feminisms.
To sum up, the women’s groups that are active in feminism today
in Turkey include radical, socialist, egalitarian, secular or kemalist
feminists, and Islamic women’s groups, Kurdish women, minority
women, human rights activists, as well as autonomous and institu-
tionalized feminists and, more recently, third wave feminists.1
In Turkey, second wave feminism has contributed largely to the
emergence of academic feminism. Most of the first protagonists of
the movement were from an academic background. The foundation
of women’s studies centers at different universities at the beginning
of 1990s has contributed to the establishment and recognition of
feminist scientific approaches in academic knowledge production
processes (Arat, 1993). Drawing on the works of feminist authors
who analyze the constructions of gendered identities in the context
of nation-state building processes in Middle East and south Asian
societies (Kandiyoti, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 1997), the Turkish femi-
nist academics and activists analyzed the construction of modern
Turkish woman in the Turkish nationalist discourses—the roles
and images attributed to modern Turkish woman by republican
modernization project.2 Academic feminism made important con-
tributions in the deconstruction of kemalist women’s image and in
the critical engagement with Turkish modernization.
However, these analyses have not dealt with some very impor-
tant questions regarding the variety of ways in which women from
different ethnic, religious, cultural, and class origins have been
influenced by, or come into contact with, the Turkish modern-
ization project. Specific and group-related questions such as age,
religious affiliation, ethnic identity, class position, or geographical
location were not considered in this second wave feminist analyses.
Similarly, these do not address questions regarding which kind
of interaction patterns have taken place between the hegemonic
Turkish modernization project and the women of other groups or,
G e n de r e d S u bj e c t i v i t y a n d P ol i t ic a l A g e nc y 109
importantly, how these encounters would be processed into differ-

ent subjectivities (Durakbasa, 1998, 29). In short, a differentiated
approach is lacking in these analyses both with regard to exami-
nation of women’s groups along axes of difference (urban/rural,
secular/religious, Turkish/Kurdish/minority, lower class/middle
class, educated/noneducated) as well as varying power structures
and different subjectivation forms to which women are exposed.
The construction of identity cannot be examined only with ref-
erence to gender identity in case of Kurdish and Islamist activists
and women of other minority groups. Other inequalities and differ-
ences (religious, ethnic, and national identity) and the interaction
between these should be taken into consideration. Moreover, these
should be investigated in relation to, and within the framework of,
hegemonic relations both within the borders of nation-state and at
transnational level. For an adequate analysis of different feminist
politics and of different types of political subjectivities and their
diverse knowledge projects,3 a multiplicity of contradictory axes
of subordination, which are influential at the level of state (dis-
cursive, institutional, and actor’s level), within the sphere of civil
society, and within family and kinship relations should be taken
into account simultaneously (Yuval-Davis, 2006; 1997, 14).
In this chapter, I look at transnational cultures of exchange in
feminist theories by focusing on the circulation and reception of
feminist ideas among second wave feminists and Kurdish activists
in Turkey—particularly, their encounter with Western feminisms
and confrontation with each other. In doing so, I consider feminist
knowledge production, gendered political praxis, and dynamics of
transnational feminist activism as interrelated processes in Turkish
context. In my analysis, combining intersectionality approach
and the insights provided by research on transnational feminism,
I focus mainly on two groups of women activists (Kurdish and
Turkish female activists) but the analysis can be seen to address
broader questions such as: How do transnational political struc-
tures affect the existing gendered identities and how do they inter-
act with the existing gendered hierarchy and difference structures?
What are the effects of transnational exchange on feminist knowl-
edge production processes in Turkey? How do different feminisms
and movements interact with local feminisms and women’s activ-
ism and what kinds of transformations take place in this interac-
tion process? While these questions set a context for this piece,
they are within the more specific focus of the relationship between
Turkish and Kurdish feminisms and how an intersectional analysis
can illuminate the power dynamics of transnational and national
feminisms.
In the first part of this chapter I consider how the combination
of transnational advocacy networks and the analyses of transna-
tional feminisms offer the most relevant framework to understand
transnational knowledge production in different women’s groups
in Turkey. In the second part, I look at the organizational, finan-
cial, and ideological exchange as well as solidarity of women’s
movements in Turkey with other women’s nongovernmental orga-
nizations (NGOs) beyond the national borders. In the third part
I focus on intellectual encounter of Kurdish women with Turkish
feminists and Western feminism and their critique on both of
these feminisms. In the fourth part of the chapter, drawing on
the interviews that I conducted with the Kurdish women’s NGO
activists, I highlight the intersection of ethnic and gender iden-
tities and their mutual interaction in the formation of Kurdish
women’s political subjectivity.
Transnational Networks and Transnational

Cultures of Exchange among Feminisms
Recognizing that the term “transnational” has been employed for
over 15 years now in social sciences literature, Inderpal Grewal
draws attention to the multiple ways of understanding it (Grewal,
2008, 189). She differentiates mainly between three approaches
with respect to their subject matter and discipline within which
the term is being employed: (1) migration studies, (2) examination
of social movements, and (3) transnationality as signifying cultural
praxis and meanings in late capitalism (Grewal, 2008, 189). The
significance of the transnational approach for the feminist activists
lies, according to Grewal, in the fact that it enables the activists to
recognize the diversity of feminisms and practices (Grewal, 2008,
190) and to understand the power relations between them:
[The activists] can understand that power relations and inequalities

reside in all feminisms. In particular, these power differences may
be based on class, race, sexuality, nationality, religion, and geo-
politics. Local politics are also altered by their situatedness within
the transnational since nation-state boundaries cannot be seen as
anything but porous; on the contrary, local and global are not sep-
arate and opposite but are linked and altered by their relation to
the transnational. (Grewal, 2008, 191)
In this sense, it is especially important to stress that the reception,

appropriation, production, interpretation, and the distribution of
Western feminism and ideas of first world feminism do not take
place in a social vacuum. These should be considered as embedded
in unequal power relations.4
Transnationalism can both serve as an explanatory frame for the
emergence of transnational networks within the borders of nation-
state, as well as for to be able to grasp the new emergent forms of
gendered political subjectivities and positioning. The main field
in which transnational advocacy networks are likely to emerge
are, according to Keck and Sikkink, women’s activism, human
rights, and environmental activism (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, 2).
Because the transnational networks are mediated through domes-
tic political structures, these play an important role in the emer-
gence of transnational networks (Ibid., 2). Transnationalism as
a research perspective enables the tracing of the changes in the
self-perception of actors related to the changes in the construc-
tion of their identities and interests (Ibid., 17).5 Through encoun-
ter, exchange, and cooperation with other NGOs in transnational
space, the women’s NGO activists (Turkish, Kurdish, and Islamic)
have access to new techniques, strategies, discursive positioning,
and possibilities of political identification, which might enable the
transformation of existing gender roles and praxis as well as the
emergence of new gender orders, and even the acceleration of this
process. Transnationalization approach offers at the same time a
relevant research framework in order to capture knowledge trans-
fer, cultural diffusion, and the appropriation of Western feminist
ideas and works by different women’s groups in Turkey.
One of the most striking features of women’s movements and
women’s NGOs is the existence of their contact and exchange with
other women’s movements and international NGOs and suprana-
tional organizations. This manifests itself not only in the existence
of the ideological, intellectual, and organizational solidarity net-
works with other women NGOs and movements across borders
but also in the availability of financial support of the international
organizations. In what follows, I will treat these relations first
with respect to the ideological and organizational exchange and
knowledge transfer. Then I will focus on the financial aspect of

this exchange.
Transnational Networking of Women’s

Movements in Turkey
Two important aspects characterize the dynamic and nature of
women’s activism in Turkey. The first aspect relates to the exten-
sive NGOization of the sphere of civil society in general and in
particular the NGOization of women’s movements since 1990s
and the further acceleration of this process in 2000s during the
Process of Turkey’s Accession to European Union. The second
aspect, very much related to this first one, is the striking transna-
tional character of women’s movements in Turkey, which means
that the political engagement of women activists in NGOs in
Turkish civil society takes place in an environment of extensive
organizational, ideological, and financial exchange with other
international NGOs and supranational organizations such as EU
and United Nations Organization.
Although the involvement of the women’s NGOs in trans-
national women’s networks is considered to have started at the
middle of 1990s (Ertürk, 2006, 89) and in this sense, is seen as
linked to rise of transnational women’s human rights regime at
global level and, in Turkish context, to the institutionalization and
NGOization of women’s movements, it should be noted that the
second wave feminist movement has had a transnational charac-
ter from its very beginning. Nevertheless it should be noted also
that though the feminist movement constitutes one of the best
documented social movements compared to other movements
in Turkey, the transnational networking of movements has been
barely addressed, if it is noticed at all, in the literature.6 This
applies to the feminist movement of 1980s as well as the women’s
movements of after 1990s.
While feminist consciousness raising groups appeared in the
public sphere in the 1980s, the emergence of second wave femi-
nism in Turkey can be traced back to the mid-1970s. Tekeli under-
lines the participation of Turkish female academicians in the first
UN World Conference on Women in 1975 in Mexico as one of
the decisive factors that played an important role in the emergence
of the feminist movement in Turkey (Tekeli, 1989). In this sense,
the publication of Tekeli’s pioneer article in 1977, which is titled

Siyasal Iktidar Karsisinda Kadin [The Women Facing the Political
Power] in one of the serious social science periodical Toplum ve
Bilim [Society and Science], influenced the framework for the
future development of women’s studies and academic feminism
in Turkey. In this article Tekeli refers to, among others, the works
of French, English, and American feminist writers such as Betty
Friedan, Kate Millet, Juliette Mitchell, Shelia Rowbotham, and
Simone de Beauvoir (Tekeli, 1977). After 1980, one of the first
activities of the feminist women was to organize a symposium on
“women’s question” in 1982 in Istanbul to which the French fem-
inist Giselle Halimi was also invited (Tekeli, 1989). As one of its
first activities, Kadin Cevresi [The Women’s Circle Co.], founded at
the end of 1983, translated feminist classics such as “Conversations
between Alice Schwarzer and Simone de Beauvoir” into Turkish
(Ibid.). The influence of the second wave feminist movement,
and the emergent academic feminism, led to the establishment of
women’s studies centers in the 1990s. Young Turkish female aca-
demics who have completed their PhDs in Western countries and
learned about first world feminism played a significant role in the
spreading and establishment of feminist ideas in Turkish public
sphere. These very well-educated, middle- and upper-class women
with professional background returned with their intellectual lug-
gage of Western feminist concepts and categories such as “gender,”
“patriarchy” (Arat, 1993, 126), “women’s liberation,” “emanci-
pation,” and “womanhood,” establishing these as the common
denominator uniting women from different social groups on the
essentialized basis of their subordination experience.
International networking of women’s movements cannot be
confined to the scope of ideological-intellectual-organizational
exchange and solidarity. Many of women’s NGOs were founded
and continued to be funded by support of international NGOs
and donations of supranational organizations. For example, the
publication of the monthly feminist magazine Pazartesi (1995–
2005), which has played a very influential role on the discussions
in feminist public in Turkey, was made possible due to 5 million
German mark donation provided by Women’s Foundation (FAS) of
Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Kocali, 2005, 140).7 In a similar fashion,
the Kurdish Women’s Centre (Ka-Mer) could conduct its project
“The Development of Permanent Methods in the Struggle against
Killings Committed in the Name of ‘Honour’ in the Southeast

and East Anatolian Regions” because of the financial support
of Swedish Istanbul Consulate General, Swiss Embassy, and
Open Society Institute in Istanbul (Ka-Mer reports from 2003;
2004; 2005). Similarly feminist NGO projects such as Amargi
(Women’s Academy, Istanbul) and Gökkusagi (Kurdish Women’s
NGO Rainbow, Istanbul) were realized through the financial sup-
port of KAGIDER—Kadin Girisimciler Dernegi (Women’s Fund
by Women’s Entrepreneurs Association, Istanbul), which was
financed by Istanbul Dependance of Georg Soros Open Society
Institute (Open Society Institute Report, 2006, 117).
Furthermore the knowledge exchange and transnational net-
works cannot be confined just to the Turkish feminist scene.
Kurdish feminists (i.e., through migrant organizations in Europe)
and Islamic women’s movements have their own institutional/
intellectuals contacts and knowledge networks. An evaluation of
the international networking of Kurdish women with other wom-
en’s NGOs in Europe and America demonstrate that they have
many connections and contacts. But the Kurdish women’s NGOs
enjoy additionally the solidarity and political/organizational sup-
port of the migration organizations that are founded in industrial-
ized societies and liberal democracies of West Europe (regarding
high presence of Kurdish migrant population particularly in coun-
tries such as Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium,
and Denmark) and in the United States (Kayhan, 2000).
There are multiple examples of this intellectual and ideological
exchange between women’s movements and NGOs in Europe and
in the United States. What is of interest here is the way in which
such international networking led to the significant impact of the
second wave women’s movement on knowledge production pro-
cesses and, particularly, on the political processes in Turkey. The
above-mentioned pluralization of women’s groups and ideological
diversification occurring in the beginning of 1990s can be seen as
the democratization of landscape of women’s activism in Turkey.
On the other hand, parallel to the NGOization and transnational-
ization of women’s groups, a fragmentation of the feminist move-
ment occurred. Thus different women’s organizations (Islamic,
Turkish, or Kurdish) promote their own gender norms, competing
with each other (Ertürk, 2006, 82; Kardam, 2005, 165). Kurdish,
Islamic, feminist, and kemalist women’s NGOs, each propagate
their own development and modernization models (Esim and

Cindoglu, 1999, 186).
There are considerable differences among these three groups of
female activists (Kurdish, Turkish, and Islamic) with respect to their
politicization processes and strategies of transnational network-
ing and their positioning toward the Turkish state. These three
women groups have undergone different processes of integration/
nonintegration into the hegemonic nation-building and modern-
ization project of Turkish state. In other words, the Islamic and
Kurdish women have been exposed to other mobilization, politici-
zation structures, and technologies of governmentality compared
to Turkish women. Therefore, they have developed different forms
of political agency and gendered subjectivity in transnational space
and these are products of multiple axes of subordination to which
they are exposed to at national, local, and international level.
K nowledge Production and Exchange with

the Western Feminism: The Case of
Kurdish Activists
The central issues and agendas of the feminist struggle in the 1980s
and 1990s can be summarized under the rubric of “body politics.”
Together with the critique on violence against women, sexual
harassment, honor killing, exploitation of female body, feminists
have deconstructed the hegemonic images of appropriate woman-
hood and manhood in the society, pushing against the patriarchal
character of family and the institution of marriage. Parallel to their
critique on masculinist sociocultural practices and patriarchal val-
ues dominating microcosms of daily life, they have addressed the
patriarchal character of Turkish state. They emphasized the impor-
tance of individuation and liberation process together with equal
citizenship rights for the women.8 Despite considerable success
of second wave feminist politics, a new phase began around the
millennium with a new political focus. The kind of feminist lan-
guage and style developed by second wave feminists in the last two
decades of the twentieth century was understood as no longer ade-
quate. The category of women, the notion of emancipation, and the
process of individuation as desirable projects for one’s life did not
and do not mean the same thing for a lower-class Kurdish woman
in East Anatolia as it did for a middle-class Turkish woman with a
profession and living in West Anatolia. Kurdish women are famil-

iar with the experience of subordination based on their ethnocul-
tural identity. They know already what it means being the “other”;
they were exposed to a “double otherization” as Kurdish women.
So the intellectual encounter of Kurdish women with Turkish fem-
inists and Western feminism offers an interesting intersection to
examine the role of transnational feminism.
Employing the work of Margaret Keck and Kathyrin Sikkink,
three political contexts can be identified within which transnational
networks would probably emerge: (1) when “channels between
domestic groups and their governments are blocked,” (2) when
activists and political actors believe that transnational networks
will support their mission and political agenda, and (3) in the case
that the conferences and contacts help in creation and strengthen-
ing of the networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, 12). A combination
of the first and the second context provides the fitting analytical
framework for the investigation of women’s movements and their
transnational networks in Turkey. Yet for a proper understanding
of the specific conditions within which the Kurdish women are
active politically, it is necessary to consider their sociopolitically
marginal position in the Turkish society. I think the availability of
their transnational networks can be understood well in the light of
analogy to the reflections on the Latin American women’s groups
by Sonia Alvarez. She emphasizes, in Latin American context, that
one of the reasons why the women are engaged in transnational
networks beyond the national borders is because they want to reaf-
firm and reconstruct their marginalized political position and sub-
altern status in their own societies through the solidarities with
other stigmatized groups (Alvarez, 2000, 4). This reasoning can
be seen in the situation of Kurdish women in Turkey.
The Kurdish women stand on the intersecting point of various
axes of power and political discourses and are exposed to different
forms of subordination (gendered, ethnical, and socioeconomic
oppression), which is reflected in the formation of her subjectiv-
ity and in the issues and problems articulated by Kurdish wom-
en’s politics.9 Through their articulation of the sexism of Kurdish
community, through the articulation of nationalism and racism
of Turkish state, and through their critique of ethnocentrism and
epistemic violence of Turkish and Western feminisms, Kurdish
women transform their status from being suppressed objects to
that of being a privileged subject of a certain political discourse

(Kurdish feminist discourse) and of a certain reservoir of know-
ledge (being a Kurdish woman in Turkish society).
In this context, the Kurdish women do not confine them-
selves exclusively to gender question, they advocate the necessity
of another feminism that should take into consideration national,
ethnical, class identities, and differences among women. Therefore
the Kurdish women stress constantly that they have two identities
and struggle against this double suppression of both: on the one
hand they struggle for the liberation of their Kurdish identity, on
the other for the liberation as woman (Ayten, 2000, 23).
The critique on Turkish feminist movement in its initial phase
by Kurdish activists is threefold.10 First the Turkish feminist have
failed to recognize Kurdish feminism and failed to show solidarity
with Kurdish feminists. Second, even when Kurdish women are
heard, Turkish feminists display a condescending attitude, an atti-
tude of endurance, toward Kurdish women. Finally, Turkish femi-
nists are criticized for having a narrow understanding of feminism,
which disregards other forms of subordination and knowledge
(Kayhan, 2000). For example, it is significant that Turkish femi-
nists have translated only the works of white women’s movement
from America and from Europe into Turkish, and overlooked the
works of black feminism and other feminisms (Ibid.).
In order to call into question the racist and discriminating prac-
tices of Turkish women, Kurdish feminists refer to the works of
black feminism from United States, especially the works of Angela
Davis and bell hooks. Unsurprisingly given the history, second
wave feminism is publicly understood to represent all of feminists
in Turkey. For Kurdish feminists, drawing on black feminism
facilitates the articulation of their specific concerns and differen-
tiates their ideological position within a feminist movement and
in broader Turkish public sphere (Canan and Halide, 2005, 229,
235). For them, there are clear parallels between the experiences
of black women in United States and their own situation in Turkey
(Berivan, 1999).
The Kurdish feminists critique the knowledge hierarchies of
Turkish feminists as well as Western feminism. Their critique of
the pejorative attitude of Western feminists is even harsher than
their critique of Turkish feminists. The behavior of Western femi-
nists toward Kurdish women is described by Fatma Kayhan as “the
situation of an ape in cage as the object of scientific investigation”

and seen as a “typical example of eurocentristic approach of white
western feminism” (Kayhan, 2000). Kayhan writes that at first she
enjoyed being perceived as a Kurdish feminist and the extensive
attention of female researchers from Europe and United States
who conducted interviews with her. Yet, she came to recognize
the homogenizing and eurocentristic attitude of the researchers
and the discrepancies between what she said in interviews and how
she was represented (Kayhan, 2000).
I ntersection of Gender and Ethnicity in

the Political Positioning of Kurdish
Women’s NGO Activists
The dual character of Kurdish women’s identity is emphasized in
the literature by Kurdish women as noted above. Being Kurdish
and being a woman—and the contradictory interaction pattern
between these two—were the dominating themes in interviews
that I conducted with the Kurdish NGOs activists.11 The following
selected interview passages demonstrate the dynamics pertaining
to (1) awakening of consciousness about being a gendered sub-
ject as a source of political identification, (2) political positioning
within the discursive and organizational field, and (3) redefini-
tion/intervention in the conventional understanding of feminism
and feminist politics.
Before developing an understanding of their political identity as
Kurdish feminists, my interviewees were engaged in human rights
organizations, leftist ideological activities, and/or organizations
within which Kurdish ethnic identity was defined as the political
focus. They had become aware of themselves as gendered politi-
cal subjects, but this process of awareness varied from woman to
woman and was not free from contradictions. One of my inter-
view partners, a well-known female activist and a respected person
in Kurdish political circles, recalled this emerging consciousness
and connected it to a very specific experience of violence toward
Kurdish women:
I had already a consciousness about women’s question. When I look

back to the ‘80s, I can remember for instance that many women
waited in front of the prison in order to visit their husbands who
were also the same persons who exercised violence on their wives.
Violence belongs to the daily life of women. I must have also learned
that the women have to experience violence mostly within in the
family, which became a normality and which has been even glorified
(i.e., holy). When a man is not authoritarian enough towards his
wife, it will be joked about him as a henpecked husband. It will be
said that he cannot even control his wife. (Interview with Necla)
The development of a consciousness of being a woman and

experience of subordination stemming from gender identity is
connected to the experiences of exclusion, othering, and isolation
that these women had associated with ideology or ethnicity while
engaged in other social movements and political organizations.
These experiences framed their politicization process and their
positioning as a “Kurdish feminist.” The women emphasized that
either being of Kurdish or being a woman was undermined in each
organization:
I have noticed the following: Each time as I involved in an orga-

nization, a part of mine has been made to other. I tried to enter in
a leftist organization. In this group I was told: “place your being
Kurdish in background a little bit.” I was a Kurdish woman. As I
talked about Kurdish movement, they told me that I was national-
ist. As I mentioned Kurdish question, they said that the revolu-
tion should be realized first, and then the Kurdish Question will
be solved. That happened to me not only in the leftist organiza-
tions but also in Kurdish groups too; as I said for instance that I
am oppressed as a woman, they claimed that I pursue separatism.
(Interview with Belgin)
The problematic relationship between women and other social

movements is underlined in these narratives and draws attention
to the underlying essentialism:
I consider being a woman as an ideological fact; it is not just

something natural. The emancipation of woman is an ideological
question. If you fail to recognize this, you look for spontaneous
solutions, which generally ended up in the kitchen: That is how
the other movements deal with the Women’s Question. The women
were always actively involved in many liberation movements, but
at the end they found themselves in the kitchen. That is because
these movements do not offer any specific method of resolution.
(Interview with Ayla)
The experiences of other political organizations and the aware-

ness as a gendered subject combined with previous intellectual/
ideological questionings led to feminist consciousness and a search
for a feminist politics. After the reflection of situation of Kurdish
women as the “oppressed of the oppressed” and after engagement
with women’s movements, these interviewees concluded that an
emancipatory women’s politic is one of the few political fields
within which they can live out their dual identity:
In theory it is talked about the oppressed of the oppressed. You

find this in Marxist theories as well. It is told that the woman
is subordinated and exploited. But when you express this as a
woman, it means you pursue separatism and gender discrimina-
tion. Regarding this point, I could articulate neither my Kurdish
identity nor my gender identity in these political circles under these
conditions. As I begun to read on women’s movement I discovered
that is one of the seldom areas in which a woman can realize her
gender identity as well as her ethnic identity and make her own
politics based on these identities. (Interview with Belgin)
Working in a Kurdish women’s organization, or in a women’s

organization where women of different ethnic and cultural ori-
gins come together, seemed to suit their desire to be active politi-
cally. Nevertheless, Kurdish women struggle against monolithic
understanding of identities and emphasize instead multilayered
character of them. Democracies, one interviewee argues, should
be redefined with regard to their capacity to account for this mul-
tidimensional nature of identities:
You can be politically active in women’s organizations as a woman,

but this time it is paid no attention to the identities other than gen-
der. But I want to be able to express my Kurdish identity too. Why
should I hide my Kurdish identity? Or why should I not be engaged
politically in Kurdish question? Kurdish Question matters to me
too. I would like to be engaged in Kurdish movement as well . . . If
we talk about democracy and freedom, we had better not confine
ourselves to only one identity. (Interview with Ayla)
Kurdish female activists articulate a multilayered understand-

ing of identities, a multidimensional notion of feminism and femi-
nist politics. The Kurdish women’s movement offers a critique of
the conventional perception of feminist politics and expands the

boundaries of feminist politics in Turkey:
In Turkey you have this widespread perception that the feminists

are not concerned with anything other than women’s question.
That is not true. We are confronted with such a huge problematic
that no women’s organization can overcome alone. We talk about
a huge problem here. Why do we organize ourselves politically?
We want to define the problem; we want to bring it to the pub-
lic sphere in order to talk about the ways of solutions. Basically
we want to make politics. Therefore the women’s question should
be understood in its many aspects and in its multidimensionality.
Poverty belongs also to women’s question. Both Kurdish Question
and democratization process concern the women equally in Turkey.
(Interview with Necla)
Necla develops her own understanding of how a feminist politics

should look:
I think there are many definitions of feminism. The definitions

can vary. Inspired by bell hooks, we have decided in Ka-Mer12 that
each can define feminism in the way she likes. I do not have an
idea of revolution in my understanding of feminism. But we aim at
the transformation of the state. As enlightened citizens we would
like to have a social welfare state. Thus our aim is transformation.
(Interview with Necla)
The oppositional politics and the transformative practice is defined

by Kurdish female activists as a “politics of difference,” which has
the potential to tackle different problems, experiences, and life
conditions of different women:
I think it is desirable to make politics together with human beings

from different circles with differences. It is painful to hear their
experiences, but this makes you also strong. Pain makes you
stronger. When I see this, I want to struggle more. It should be
this kind of struggle. Otherwise what we do here, our opposition
would not move a lot. The feminism is nice, it is a good device;
but as long as I cannot adopt this in my life, as long as I do not
confront and exchange my experiences with experiences of the
“other,” feminism would not mean a lot to me. (Interview with
Belgin)
Belgin offers another example of expectations about what a wom-

en’s politics should aim for:
The majority of the feminist movements in Turkey tackles the prob-

lem of women stemming from their gender identity and pursues a
feminist politics on gender question. But we think, feminism can-
not just limit itself to body politics. Feminism is more than this.
Women’s Politics should also carry out politics of resistance against
the suppression of the people, against the assimilation, against vio-
lence, against militarism and heterosexism. The patriarchy cannot be
considered as independently neither from nationalism and nor from
militarism. They support each other mutually, and by these means
they get institutionalized and established. (Interview with Belgin)
Belgin identifies herself as member of the third wave feminism

in Turkey and believes this new understanding addresses a wider
spectrum of issues in Turkey than second wave feminism:
The more the feminists have questioned power relations and rela-
tions of domination among women themselves, the more mature
it became, and therefore it can offer answers to the many problems
of the majority of people. Thus “third wave” has a wider base and
perspective. That is why it could expand. (Interview with Belgin)
Given their experience of exclusion from Turkish feminism, it

is unsurprising that Kurdish feminist see parallels between their
experience and that of black feminists caused excluded by white
feminism in the United States and Europe. In a search for an other
feminism, Kurdish women have directed their attention on the
intellectual production of black feminism in the United States:
The more I learned about black women’s movement, the more

commonalities I have discovered between them and Kurdish wom-
en’s movement. Though black women’s movement builds part of
European and American women’s movement, the women’s move-
ments in these countries are very much “white”; they make the
black women’s movement to other. First after the independent
organization of black women, they started to criticize the whiteness
of women’s movement which could bring changes among the white
feminist movement. The Kurdish women have undergone a similar
process in Turkey. During the 80s the Kurdish women could not
even cheer slogans in Kurdish language. Even the articles about
woman’s question had not been translated into Kurdish, the prob-
lems specific to Kurdish women have found no reaction/response
among women’s movement. (Interview with Belgin)
C onclusion
As noted in the interview passages above, the Kurdish women
emphasize the mutually constitutive character of two axes of dif-
ferences (gender and ethnicity) as the sources of their identity, and
they resist being reduced to one identity that is, being seen as
either “woman” by Turkish feminists or as “Kurdish” by Kurdish
nationalist liberation movements. In the words of Yuval-Davis,
this exemplifies the irreducibility of social divisions (2006, 200).
Drawing attention to the debate between additive or constitutive
intersectionality, Yuval-Davis underlines the importance of con-
textual analysis:
The point of intersectional analysis is not to find “several iden-

tities under one” . . . This would reinscribe the fragmented, addi-
tive model of oppression and essentialize specific social identities.
Instead, the point is to analyze the differential ways in which dif-
ferent social divisions are concretely enmeshed and constructed by
each other and how they relate to political and subjective construc-
tion of identities. (Ibid., 205, 195)
Multiple intersecting sources of subordination operating on the

construction of identity cannot be reduced to one source because
they are embedded in complex and variable hegemonic power
relations. Intersectionality enables an understanding beyond
the simple cataloging and measuring of multiple social inequali-
ties (Erel et al., 2007). Intersectionality highlights the complex
ways in which social differences and inequalities are embedded in
the existing hegemonic power relations and how their meanings
become fixed through discursive and institutional power opera-
tions and praxes. In this sense, it is crucial to understand social
divisions and difference as marked by value-laden judgments, dif-
ferent access to power, and by asymmetrical allocation of resources
(Erel et al., 2007, 246):
In this way the interlinking grids of differential positioning in

terms of class, race, and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, ability,
stage in the life cycle and other social divisions, tend to create,
in specific historical situations, hierarchies of differential access
to a variety o resources- economic, political and cultural. (Yuval-
Davis, 2006, 199)
As interviewees here indicate, Kurdish female activists, different

practices of power and oppression such as sexism, militarism, capi-
talism, nationalism, and patriarchate are interwoven and cannot be
considered independently. In other words, the identity construc-
tion of Kurdish includes aspects such as educational attainment,
class positioning, and cultural affiliation as well as other structural
factors such as being Alevi, speaking the Kurdish language, and so
on. In turn, these factors can be only understood with reference to
the hegemonic power of the Turkish nation-state and transnational
organizations. Moreover, this multilayered complex and mutually
constitutive character of subordination relations sits at odds with
second wave (Turkish) feminists’ emphasis on individualism and
the emancipation process. In facilitating access to, and employ-
ing politically, white Western feminism, Turkish feminist groups
have recreated a hierarchy of power that prioritized an essentialist
model of women and of feminism.13
Employing an analytical frame of intersectionality facilitates a
demonstration of the interaction and mobilization of the different
identities as resources for the realization of political subjectivity
as in the case of Kurdish female activists. In this sense, the inter-
secting axes of differences might have productive and constitutive
power. My extensive interviews, only briefly noted here, give voice
to critical reflection regarding multiple subordination and offer
a valuable opportunity for political action for the relocation and
reinterpretation of the production of emancipatory knowledge.
As such, intersectionality enables the emergence of new political
subjectivities.
Returning to more general points noted in the introduction,
it is important to think of transnational feminist exchange and
activism alongside intersectionality. Undoubtedly the recep-
tion of first world feminism by Turkish female academicians and
activists have helped the struggle against the dominance of leftist
and nationalist discourses in Turkish public sphere and enabled
Turkish feminist to carve out some autonomous space (Acar-
Savran, 2005, 123). However, the essentialism of the move-
ment prevented it from developing a sensitivity for the specific
problems and life conditions of other groups of women with dif-

ferent affiliations and belongings.14 Drawing on their knowledge
and experience of being a Kurdish woman in their daily life and
within the political organizations in which they or their male
family members and relatives were actively involved, the Kurdish
women challenged one-dimensional understanding of woman-
hood and universalistic claims of feminist ideology/movement
in Turkey. In their attempt to define an other/different feminism
that is attentive to the specific concerns of Kurdish women, they
made use of other/different transnational feminist networks. This
included the deployment of black feminist texts. Still we cannot
assume that, as in the case of Kurdish and Turkish feminist activ-
ists, transnational feminism is a space that is more democratic
and free from oppressive relations in contrast to the national
level. On the contrary, we need to be aware of, and map, how
multiple intersecting inequalities and social differences articulate
hierarchies of differences and power relations operative at local,
national, and global arenas of feminist politics and the conse-
quences for the production of feminist knowledge. As Kaplan
reminds us, “the relation between experience and knowledge is
now seen to be not of correspondence but one fraught with his-
tory, contingency, and struggle” (1997, 149). Feminist knowl-
edge production and reception of feminist ideas in transnational
space can neither be thought of independently from hegemonic
relations that determine the social locations of women in the
countries within which they live nor from power relations and
differences among women working transnationally.
Notes
1. This is a very short overview of the historical development of second
wave feminism and the emergence of women’s movements in Turkey.
For a more detailed discussion see Al-Rebholz (2012).
2. For a more detailed discussion on the feminist analyses of the de/
construction of modern Turkish woman by nationalist discourses
please see Al-Rebholz (2010).
3. The concept “different knowledge projects” as proposed by Sandra
Harding is discussed in Yuval-Davis (2006).
4. For more on the importance of considering the embeddedness, tem-
poral and spatial, of feminisms and feminist practices see Grewal and
Kaplan (1997) and Kaplan (1997).
5. Keck and Sikkink emphasize the structure and actor-centered

character of their approach (1998, 5). Drawing on the new social
movements’ research and research on NGOs, they stress the actor-
centered direction of their analysis through the concepts like shared
worldview, common discourses, shared norms and values, framing,
storytelling, and symbolic politics (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, 17).
6. One exception is Ertürk (2006). In the context of the second wave
feminism in Germany, Regina Dackweiler and Reinhild Schäfer
notice that the internationality of the women’s movement gets little
attention in the literature and so they emphasize the importance of
international theoretical exchange “to grasp as a resource which is
available to the women’s movement and which influenced its devel-
opment positively” (Dackweiler and Schäfer, 1999, 201).
7. The financial support was stopped by the foundation in 2000 and
the publishing of the magazine continued for 18 months due to the
financial support of another American foundation.
8. For a more detailed account of the themes dominant in the two
initial decades of second wave feminist movement in Turkey see
Al-Rebholz (2007).
9. For a detailed analysis and account of sociopolitical context enabling
and restricting conditions for a political mobilization of Kurdish
women in Turkish public sphere in the aftermath of 1980 coup
D’etat and the background, for example, family history, political
experiences, motivations, and reasons of the formation of different
types of gendered political subjectivity among Kurdish women, see
Caglayan (2007, 165–223).
10. This is now changing as some feminists begin to see the essential-
ism in employing “womanhood” as the only relevant category of
analyzing subordination relations. Regarding the honor killings
and the official state politics and public discourse that try to label
honor killings as an ethnic phenomenon specific to Kurdish popu-
lation, (rather than as a product of patriarchal gender relations in
Turkey), one can observe the increasing emergence of solidarity and
cooperation networks between Turkish and Kurdish feminists. In
another context, feminist anthropologist Aksu Bora offers a critical
examination of Turkish nationalism and Kemalist modernization as
the prerequisite of proper feminist politics in Turkey. She states that
“regarding the relationship between Kurdish women and feminism,
it is not only a question of recognition of difference, but also it must
be considered as a chance for a critical self-reflection on the side of
feminists” (Bora, 2004, 109).
11. These interviews are drawn from a larger project, entitled “Competing
Conceptions of Civil Society and the Formation of Different
Intellectuality Modes in 1990s Turkey: Liberal, Radical Feminist
and Kurdish Feminist Discursivities in Comparison.” The interview

passages used in this chapter have been translated into English by
the author and serve as an example of the intersection of ethnic and
gender identity based on the case of Kurdish women activists.
12. Kurdish Women’s Centre, Diyarbakir.
13. Similarly, Kathy Davis criticizes global feminism noting that the
power relations—hegemonic relations within which the women are
embedded, living in different areas of world—are often neglected
(Davis, 2009, 197). She adds that the meaning of family, community,
and social bonds were not taken into consideration by the notion of
global sisterhood.
14. Upon reflection, one socialist feminist confesses, they feared that
feminist politics would be rather divided if one expresses other sub-
ordination axes beyond gender identity. For instance, Turkish femi-
nists could not understand why the emphasis on Kurdish as mother
language by Kurdish feminists in the public sphere should play such
an important role in women’s politics (Acar-Savran, 2005, 124).
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Bora, Aksu. 2004. “Feminizm: Sinirlar ve Ihlal Imkani.” Birikim

(August/September): 106–112.
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Iletisim: Istanbul.
Canan and Halide. 2005. “Feminist Kürt Kadin Olusumlari.” In
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6
G e n de r Va r i a nc e: Th e
I n t e r sec t ion of Un de r sta n di ngs
H e l d i n t h e M e dic a l a n d
S o c i a l S c i e nc e s
Ryan Combs
When examining the medical and social position of gender vari-

ant people, it is important to consider the divergent understand-
ings of sex, gender, gender identity, and, to some extent, sexuality,
and the ways in which these beliefs influence health practice.
Doctors and policy makers rely upon evolving, ambiguous notions
of gender to make decisions about who to treat when approached
by gender variant people. This chapter discusses how gender vari-
ant experiences, such as those of trans and intersex people, are
conceptualized differently in social science and medical literature.1
In addition, it explores how social, biological, medical, and discur-
sive constructions of gender affect treatment. I do not attempt to
give definitive definitions of sex, gender, gender identity, or gen-
der dysphoria; instead, I highlight the etiological and definitional
ambiguity found in the literature and the problems posed by this
inconsistency.2
This research engages in intersectional analysis in the fields of
politics and health policy studies. Earlier in this book, contributor
Wendy Smooth discusses several characteristics of intersectional
analysis. Among those aspects of particular interest here are the
rejection of essentialism; the insistence upon variation within cate-
gories of social identity; the recognition that social identity catego-
ries and power systems shift across time and location; and the idea
132 R y a n C om b s
that power and oppression are not mutually exclusive. Working

across disciplinary boundaries using an intersectional analysis can
help us begin to understand the complex picture in this area of
health practice. Inconsistent understandings of sex, gender, and
gender identity across specialties give rise to ambiguity that, in
turn, complicates the policy and politics of health. An intersec-
tional framework helps us better understand the complexity found
in this area of health-care decision making.
Ambiguous definitions of gender, sex, and gender identity are
problematic in two ways. First, they raise questions about authen-
ticity and individual agency. Who is setting the discourse about
gender variant people? Who is able to make decisions about what
constitutes an authentic gender identity? Which states of being
require treatment and which do not? Second, they bring to the
surface structural concerns about rationing and service delivery.
If there is ambiguity about gender identity as a concept, who is
qualified to make treatment decisions about it? How should prac-
titioners construct treatment plans and allocate resources to an
issue that is so difficult to categorize? I argue that these prob-
lems stem in part from the different and sometimes incongruent
definitions used. I begin by tracing a history of gender variant
experiences in medicine, which conceptualizes gender difference
through a pathological framework. Then, I consider contempo-
rary contributions from the field of social sciences, which prob-
lematize binary constructions of gender.3 I conclude by discussing
how intersectional analyses help us understand gender variance
and responses to it.
G ender Identity in Psychiatry and

Medicine: Pioneers in Sexology
The treatment of trans people, where one’s conception of their
innermost gender does not match their physical sex, is heavily
influenced by the practitioner’s viewpoint about the origin of the
individual’s dilemma. Through the medical lens, gender variance
is usually considered pathological (Ekins and King, 1996; Kessler
and McKenna, 2000). Locating the treatment of gender dyspho-
ria in these fields has created a very strong association between
gender variant identities and mental disorder. A psychomedical
G e n de r Va r i a nc e 133
perspective informs public, as well as healthcare, discourse about

transsexualism. Hines (2007) notes:
Over the last century, medical perspectives have occupied a dom-

inant position that has significantly affected how transgender is
viewed and experienced in Western society. Although contempo-
rary medical approaches represent a more complex understanding
of transgender practices than previously offered, I have argued that
there remain serious problems in the correlation of transgender and
biological and/or psychological pathology. (Hines, 2007, 183)
Likewise, Hird (2002) says that psychiatric and medical perspec-

tives have been the main theoretical avenue by which transsexual-
ism has been analyzed. Below, I consider a few of the key players
in medicine and discuss what they say about gender and gender
dysphoria.
In the historical narratives, the modern medicalized concept of
gender variant identities finds one of its earliest and most mean-
ingful roots in the work of Prussian-born physician Dr. Magnus
Hirschfeld. Historian Susan Stryker describes Hirschfeld, who was
active in medicine from the late 1890s to the early 1930s, as a “piv-
otal figure in the political history of sexuality and gender” (2008,
38) and a “pioneering advocate” for trans people (2008, 39). In
1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee,
the world’s first social movement organization for homosexual
people and, in 1919, he opened the Institute for Sexual Science in
Berlin (Stryker and Whittle, 2006; Stryker, 2008). According to
Meyerowitz (2002), Hirschfeld campaigned for homosexual rights
and published widely on the topic.
While early sexologists considered people with cross-gender
identities homosexual, Hirschfeld was among the first to concep-
tualize them separately, as “transvestites” (See also Hirschfeld,
2006, 28–39). Hirschfeld and his team used this term to describe
people with cross-gender identities that included both those who
cross-dressed and those who underwent “sex transformation”
(Meyerowitz, 2002, 15). Meyerowitz adds that Hirschfeld believed
that “hermaphrodites, androgynes, homosexuals, and transvestites
constituted distinct types of sexual ‘intermediaries,’ natural varia-
tions that all probably had an inborn organic basis” (2002, 19).
Hirschfeld arranged the first documented male-to-female (MTF)
genital transformation surgery for a trans woman named Lili Elbi

in 1931 (Meyerowitz, 2002; Stryker, 2008).4
In 1947, as the study of sex and sexuality was becoming topical
in the United States, Dr. Alfred Kinsey became the director of the
newly founded Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University.
Kinsey played an important role in changing the way sex was stud-
ied and the way human sexuality was understood. Rather than
placing moral value on some sexual practices over others, Kinsey, a
professor of zoology, approached human sexuality as a taxonomist
(Bullough, 1998). He created a 0–7 scale for sexual orientation,
which ranged from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homo-
sexual. He was among the first to argue that homosexuality was
along a spectrum of “normal” sexual behavior (Kinsey, Pomeroy,
and Martin, 1948). His books Sexual Behaviour in the Human
Male in 1948 and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953
were controversial because of their explicit discussions about the
taboo subject of sex. Kinsey’s pioneering work contributed to a
liberalization of attitudes about sexuality both in the academy and
in popular culture (Bullough, 1998).
Kinsey became interested in transgender and cross-dressing
people in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Meyerowitz, 2001).
Although gender identity was not a focal point of Kinsey’s
research, he came across and interviewed transgender people while
collecting sexual histories. It was around that time that Kinsey
met Louise Lawrence, a person assigned male at birth but began
living full time as a woman in 1942. Lawrence provided Kinsey
with resources about trans issues and had influenced some of his
ideas about gender and sexuality (Meyerowitz, 2006). Kinsey’s
work was influential in developing biological sex and gender as
different concepts; his writing on the subject of gender variance
helped to solidify his theories on sexual difference (Meyerowitz,
2001). However, while Kinsey accepted cross-dressing and cross-
gender identity, he hit the “limits of his sexual liberalism” when
considering the idea of genital surgery (Meyerowitz, 2001, 89).
Harry Benjamin
The work of endocrinologist Dr. Harry Benjamin—a man who had
connections with both Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey—
would prove the most significant in creating a space within medicine
for transsexual people (Stryker and Whittle, 2006). Although he

originally specialized in tuberculosis, Benjamin became inter-
ested in trans people after Dr. Alfred Kinsey contacted him about
a patient in 1948. Benjamin, who popularized the term “trans-
sexual,” appeared to feel sincere empathy for trans people and has
been described as “compassionate though paternalistic” (Stryker
and Whittle, 2006, 45). He believed in a mixed etiology for gen-
der variance, which he considered psychopathological, and argued
that trans identities (along with homosexual identities) are immu-
table. Benjamin’s work focused almost exclusively on those along
the male-to-female spectrum, presumably because he rarely came
across female-to-male trans people.
In Benjamin’s 1954 article entitled Transsexualism and
Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes,
Benjamin states that transvestites are heterosexual (meaning
people who were born male—assigned and attracted to females),
while transsexual people are homosexual (meaning people who
were born male—assigned and attracted to males). He believed
this so strongly that he commented that “for (transsexual people)
to be attracted to ‘other females’ appears to be a perversion” and
“homosexual inclinations always exist in a transsexualist whether
they result in actual physical contact or not” (Benjamin, 2006,
47). These beliefs seem odd and heterosexist by today’s standards.
In addition, Benjamin believed that physical and facial characteris-
tics should be considered in determining suitability for treatment,
presumably to ensure that trans women’s transition would pro-
duce a passable outcome.
In 1966, Benjamin published an influential book entitled The
Transsexual Phenomenon, in which he defined transsexualism as a
medical condition, charted possible treatments, and discussed his
views on their efficacy. Benjamin’s approach was motivated by a
belief that trans people are often unable to function in their origi-
nal gender and were at risk of suicide (Denny, 2006). For exam-
ple, he writes the following in the conclusion of The Transsexual
Phenomenon:
From the therapeutic end, it cannot be doubted or denied that

surgery and hormone treatment can change a miserable and mal-
adjusted person of one sex into a happier and more adequate,
although by no means neurosis-free, personality of the opposite
sex. (1966, 92)
Significant in Benjamin’s work was the idea that transsexual

people’s gender identity cannot be changed; therefore efforts to
adapt to their birth sex are fruitless. He proposed instead that the
individual’s physical body should be matched up to their identity.
Although Benjamin was an endocrinologist, he believed that psy-
chiatrists should “have the last word” about whether or not some-
one can transition between genders (2006, 50).
Harry Benjamin’s model became very prominent after The
Transsexual Phenomenon’s publication and heralded medical and
psychiatric treatment for gender variant conditions on a wider
scale. This was not without drawbacks. Both doctors and patients
tended to narrate the trans experience “almost entirely in terms
of misery and anguish” (Denny, 2006, 175). Benjamin’s model
resulted in a quite narrow view of who was considered legitimately
transsexual:
To qualify for treatment, it was important that applicants report

that their Gender Dysphoria manifested at an early age; that they
have a history of playing with dolls as a child, if born male, or
trucks and guns, if born female; that their sexual attractions were
exclusively to the same biological sex; that they have a history
of failure at endeavours undertaken while in the original gender
role; and that they pass or had potential to pass successfully as
a member of the desired sex. (Denny, 1992, as cited in Denny
2006, 177)
This, according to Denny, led to patients being denied treatment

for reasons such as their sexual orientation, relationship status,
attractiveness, success in their original gender role, and knowledge
about transsexualism. Following their hormone and surgery treat-
ments, trans people were encouraged to reenter society and blend
in as “normal” men and women.
An examination of Benjamin’s work offers not only a history of
trans as a term and concept, but also a story about the premise of
diagnosis and treatment that holds authority to the present day.
The importance of Benjamin’s influence cannot be understated as
it signaled an important shift underpinning contemporary medi-
cal and popular discourse. The “true transsexual” narrative pro-
posed by Benjamin influenced the approaches taken at the onset of
wide-scale treatment of gender variant conditions through gender
clinics in the mid-1960s (Rudacille, 2005). Its significance was
to provide trans people with space in existing male/female gen-

der categories through clinical assessment and access by providing
a medically supported transition. In this system, surgery became
synonymous with gender change. Trans people’s gender identi-
ties were legitimated through medical assessment and treatment
processes.
John Money
Among those influenced by Benjamin in the 1960s was Dr. John
Money at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, home to the first
gender identity clinic.5 Sexologist John Money explored the topic
of gender by paying special attention to intersex and transsexual
individuals. After receiving his PhD from Harvard University in
1952, Money took a job at the Psychohormonal Research Unit
at Johns Hopkins. There he conducted research into the psycho-
logical development of gender for over 50 years. Money’s work
had a great impact on modern understandings of sex and gender.
Concurrent with the start of the second wave feminist movement,
Money can be credited with conceptualizing a person’s gender as a
separate entity from their physical sex—coining terms like gender
role and gender identity to describe one’s inner sense of their gen-
der (Colapinto, 2001). Also among his major contributions to this
area of medicine were the pioneering of transsexualism as a diag-
nostic category and the academic legitimization of hormones and
surgery as treatments for transsexual people (Bullough, 2003).
By 1965, the first transsexual surgery in the United States was
completed at Johns Hopkins Hospital, creating a media storm
(Colapinto, 2001). In 1969, Money coauthored a textbook with
Dr. Richard Green called Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment,
which established a protocol for treating transsexual people
(Denny, 2006). He then coauthored a book with Anke Ehrhardt
entitled Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, where they put forward
the view that gender was malleable for a certain period after birth
(Money and Ehrhardt, 1972). Money quickly became famous for
his gender malleability hypothesis, which held that gender iden-
tity could be assigned during a window in the early years of life.
During this time, according to Money, nurture overrules nature.
An experiment with his theory of malleability would determine
Money’s lasting legacy.
John/Joan Case
John Money’s reputation was ultimately tarnished when his meth-
ods failed with regard to case of John/Joan, aka David Reimer
(Fausto-Sterling, 2000b; Colapinto, 2001; Butler, 2001). David
Reimer was a non-intersex male child whose penis was severed
during a botched circumcision in the mid-1960s. Reimer’s parents,
who were understandably distraught by the event, came across
Dr. Money’s work with transsexual and intersex people when he
presented it on a television show. David’s parents met with Money
and decided to raise David as a girl. David and his identical twin
brother made annual visits to Baltimore to see Money’s team.
Money used David’s story (then called Brenda) as evidence to pro-
mote his theories about gender. However, the picture Money pre-
sented about a happy and well-adjusted girl did not match up with
David’s reality or the observations of his parents, particularly as he
grew older. So although David’s parents and doctors raised him as
a girl and painstakingly socialized him as female during his child-
hood, his male gender identity became apparent in his teenage
years. After he found out the truth about his history, he imme-
diately transitioned from a female gender role to living as male
(Colapinto, 2001). Although some intersex people who have been
gender assigned are reported to be happy and content with their
gender, David’s innate sense of his gender could not be overruled
by socialization (Gearhart, 1989). The outcome of David Reimer’s
failed gender assignment prompts interesting questions about the
nature of gender.
In 1997, a follow up to David Reimer’s case was published.
Diamond and Sigmundson (1997) found that although David was
consistently admonished for displaying masculine behaviors and
preferences, his resistance to female identity and reluctance to pur-
sue further surgery to obtain female genitalia persisted throughout
his childhood. Using the new lens of Reimer’s “true” male gender,
the authors concluded that “no support exists for the postulates
that individuals are psychosexually neutral at birth or that healthy
psychosexual development is dependent upon the appearance of
the genitals” (Diamond and Sigmundson, 1997, 303).
This finding has significant implications for trans people. It
raises questions about whether people have an innate sense of
their gender cemented before birth. It also acknowledges that
gender identity is not determined by genitals. Diamond succinctly

expands his thoughts about the difference between sex and gender
in a later piece: “It can be said that one is a sex and one does gen-
der; that sex typically, but not always, represents what is between
one’s legs, whereas gender represents what is between one’s ears”
(Diamond, 2002).
While Money advocated surgery for some trans people, his insis-
tence that “appropriate” gender identity could be taught in the
early years revealed a tension. As Diamond points out, attempts
to map gender onto the body through socialization have been
unsuccessful as demonstrated acutely in the case of David Reimer.
Therefore, socialization therapies are not a viable option. This
suggests that the best route for clinicians is to listen to patients’
understandings of their gender (i.e., what is between their ears)
and respond to these realities by providing a range of possibilities
about mapping gender onto their bodies through medical (physi-
cal) means.
A Social Science Critique of the John/Joan Case

Perhaps the most important intervention into contemporary debates
regarding the evolution of gender theories has been from Judith
Butler. In maintaining that gender is discursively constructed,
Butler offers critiques of gender discourse. She has recently turned
her attention to intersex and trans subjects by looking at binary
gender systems and the psychomedical model.
Butler (2001) explores the John/Joan case from an altogether
different perspective than the medical specialists. She argues that
this case neither confirms nor denies social construction or essen-
tialist theses; rather we should read it another way. Drawing upon
Foucault’s “politics of truth,” Butler suggests that David Reimer
was treated as less than human because his gender was unintel-
ligible. She asks questions about the ways in which existing out-
side of the gender norm affects how one is recognized as human.
Butler writes:
The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered

being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition
of humanness, is not only one that, justly or unjustly, governs the
recognizability of the human but one that informs the ways we
do or do not recognize ourselves, at the level of feeling, desire,

and the body, in the moments before the mirror, in the moments
before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to
psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what
may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and, hence,
of one’s personhood. (2001, 622).
Butler makes the case that doctors exert their power to deter-
mine truths for those who exist outside of the gender norm.
While doctors search for the “true” gender of intersex children
and look for ways to create, through surgery and socialization,
the corresponding sex, Butler suggests that what gets lost is the
ability for people to exist as themselves, whatever that looks like.
She draws attention to the fact that intersex people and trans
people increasingly seek spaces to exist outside of sexual and gen-
der dimorphism.
What is important to Butler is how the central subject in the
John/Joan case, David Reimer, experiences his own truth. In his
words, Reimer rejects the proposal by doctors that without a penis
he will be, essentially, unlovable. When interrogated, scrutinized,
and ultimately coerced into an ill-fitting norm, he begins to resist.
The discourse Reimer employs retrospectively critiques the norm,
rejects the intrusions of medicine, and defines his own worth.
From Butler, we learn that the way in which gender is concep-
tualized, described, and discussed is important. Her work sug-
gests that allowing doctors to adjudicate gender is problematic and
unjust.6
Ambiguous Ideas about Gender

Medicine has predicated its understanding of gender on theo-
ries that have continuously evolved over time. This has produced
ambiguity in the literature about gender and gender variance.
Gender does not have a universal definition, neither has medicine
agreed upon a test to determine the “truth” about someone’s gen-
der. The current medical model’s approach to gender variance sits
between, and is a bad marriage of, the psychiatric, the medical,
and the social. As we have seen with Kinsey and Money, doctors
have research, political, and medical agendas that feed into their
decision making. In addition, they are restricted by, or at least
influenced by, the social constraints of the time and place in which
they work.
The contemporary gender discourse utilized by medical spe-
cialists reflects understandings that lie at the intersection between
internalized norms and the external realities of the medical model.
Kinsey, Money, and Benjamin each hit limits in their own tol-
erance. Although Kinsey was accepting of cross-dressing and
cross-gender identities, he was unwilling to accept surgery as an
appropriate treatment—partly because he was unconvinced of its
efficacy, but also because of the conflicts such surgeries pose to
his belief about the central importance of human sexual function
(Meyerowitz, 2001). Money hit the limits of his own authority
as, despite his best efforts, he refused to accept that his aggressive
methods were unable to reassign Reimer’s gender (Butler, 2001).
Benjamin hit his limit as he was unable to accept lesbian, gay, or
bisexual-identified trans people as “true transsexuals” (Benjamin,
1966). Many consider these beliefs outdated; they provide evi-
dence of the complexity of understandings about gender, sex,
and gender identity and their evolution over time. Considering
the constraints of ambiguity about these three concepts, the most
logical approach when providing care for gender variant people
seems to be for doctors to listen to a patient’s understanding of
their gender (i.e., what is happening between their ears) and make
determinations that are not only informed by medical knowledge,
but also patient-led.
This section has summarized some of the main threads of
thought in the medical sciences about gender variant people; the
next turns to social science in earnest. It discusses the work of
several social scientists and theorists and, in doing so, returns to
understandings of social construction and binary gender.
S ocial Construction
From the 1970s onward, the literature on gender develops the
idea that gender is more than simply an expression of a biological
characteristic, that is, what one’s body dictates through chromo-
somes, hormones, gonads, and genitalia. For example, some have
argued that gender is a socially constructed phenomenon. An early
seminal work looking at the social construction of gender was
the content analysis in Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements,
which examined gender displays in over five hundred photographs

found mostly in ads printed in newspapers and magazines. He
analyzed the ways in which gestures and postures reflect learned
gender behaviors. He found that men were more likely to adopt
dominant positions while women more frequently took subordi-
nate ones (Goffman, 1976). Through a process that Goffman calls
“hyper-ritualization,” he demonstrated that advertisers ritualized
gender stereotypes in their work, resulting in consistent portrayals
of women as subordinate to men.
Kessler and McKenna began to lay further foundation for theo-
ries about gender’s social construction in their 1978 book Gender:
An Ethnomethodological Approach (Kessler and McKenna, 1978).
They argued that just as gender is socially constructed, so too is
biology (Hines, 2007). Kessler and McKenna listened closely to the
experiences of trans people in their work. Drawing upon interview
data, they discussed how transsexual people demonstrate that gen-
der can be and is constructed. For example, transsexual people illus-
trate that gender is not necessarily fixed to sex assignment at birth,
in contrast to Western ideas about binary gender. Nevertheless, they
stated that, as opposed to breaking the rules about gender,
the existence of transsexualism, itself, as a valid diagnostic category

underscores the rules we have for constructing gender, and shows
how these rules are reinforced by scientific conceptions of trans-
sexualism. (Kessler and McKenna, 2000, 11—abridged reprint of
the original 1978 chapter)
Kessler and McKenna contended that of transsexual people’s con-

cerns with “passing” in a new gender and medical as well as the
legal profession’s treatment of the issue, “natural” versions of gen-
der are reproduced as a result.
Fellow ethnomethodologists West and Zimmerman (1987)
reviewed existing perspectives on gender and sex in the literature
to produce a theoretical reconceptualization of the terms. They
rejected biological determinants of gender in favor of a social model
and argued that gender is a social process embedded in day-to-day
interaction. To them, gender is not something that exists outside of
the practices that create it. It is, in their words, not an attribute of
an individual but, rather, an “emergent feature of social situations:
both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrange-
ments and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental
divisions in our society” (1987, 126). They argued that a true

understanding of the issue requires three categories: sex, gender,
and sex category. Sex is understood to be socially agreed biologi-
cal classifications. Sex category is the group we assign to people
based on the assumptions we make from social cues. Gender is the
activity that “emerge(s) from and bolster(s) claims to membership
in a sex category” (1987, 127). “Doing” gender is unavoidable in
their view, “because of the social consequences of sex category
membership: the allocation of power and resources not only in the
domestic, economic, and political domains but also in the broad
arena of interpersonal relations” (1987, 145).
Social constructionist Judith Lorber discussed gender as some-
thing that is “done.” Her work explored how gender is signaled to
others, beginning at birth and continuing throughout one’s life.
She described how gender is constructed and reinforced through
the repetition of these processes (Lorber, 2000). According to
Lorber, every aspect of our lives is infused with gender:
Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred

into our genes. Most people find it hard to believe that gender is
constantly created and recreated out of human interaction, out of
social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gen-
der, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone
constantly doing gender. (Lorber, 2000, 106)
Lorber believed that gendering serves a social function; it divides

labor and ascribes particular sets of aspirations, motivations, and
personal characteristics.7 She argued that disruptions to gender
norms such as that of transvestites and transsexual people, allow
us to reflect on how gender is produced. Like nontrans people,
trans people’s gender status is constructed by dressing and behav-
ing in ways associated with men or women. Lorber also discussed
the ways in which the processes of gender are policed through
social sanction. Sexist hierarchies are inherent in the division of
labor, where men’s work is more valued and women’s work is held
in less esteem. The construction of gender, in her opinion, has
served to make women submit to men. Feminists such as Lorber
are unequivocal in their rejection of essentialism. They believe that
women have been forced to take a submissive role due to social
functions and history, rather than the result of any biological, hor-
monal, or genetic predisposition.8
P ost - structuralism and P erformativity

Post-structuralism is a school of thought that critiques existing
social structures and rejects essentialism. Post-structuralists such
as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others have engaged with
the topics of gender and sexuality and demonstrated how gender
is produced independently of biological sex. Foucault, for example,
has made valuable contributions that inform feminist and queer
theory in relation to medicine; in particular his theories about how
and by whom power is employed, as well as about the body and
sexuality. Foucault believed that power is not necessarily tied to
any particular identity category; rather, power is available to cer-
tain people in certain situations. Foucault’s ideas of biopower and
the medical gaze (also called the clinical gaze) are relevant to this
discussion.
Biopower refers to the ability of the state to exert power to
regulate the human body (Foucault, 1984). Foucault sees the reg-
ulation of human bodies as instruments of capitalism’s economic
management, to “ensure not only their subjection but the constant
increase of their utility” (1984, 279). In other words, it serves
the capitalist state’s interest to produce normatively gendered,
heterosexual people. In addition, Foucault’s notion of biopower
highlights the power relationship between the medical profession
and the patient. The medical gaze, arising out of Foucault’s work
in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
(Foucault 1973), refers to metanarratives that have been created
about medicine in modernity. In this particular metanarrative,
doctors are thought to have the power to see through illness and
determine truth using the lens of medical science. The concepts
of biopower and medical gaze are important because of the light
they shed on the power relationship between the clinician, the
patient, and the state.
Earlier, Judith Butler’s analysis of the John/Joan case was dis-
cussed. We now turn to her most influential work, Gender Trouble,
which builds upon the work of Foucault. She contended that gen-
der identity is not fixed; it is created and recreated through prac-
tices that reinforce the binary norm. Butler proposed the concept
of performativity to show how gender is repeatedly produced:
The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of

gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the
effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender

is an “act,” as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-
criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that,
in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic
status. (Butler, 1990, 200)
Butler’s Gender Trouble represented a turning point in feminism.

She questioned the categorical foundation upon which feminist
assertions have been made, stating that “the internal paradox of
this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the
very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to represent and liberate” (1990, 203).
This calls into question gender as a binary category, opening up
possibilities for a range of articulations of gender.
Although Gender Trouble is Butler’s most influential work thus
far, it is also her most controversial. Over the years, she revisited
the topics covered in light of criticisms and updated her theoretical
standpoint. In her 1993 book Bodies that Matter, Butler “revise(d)
the performance-related terms she used in Gender Trouble” and
“explained the strained categories of materiality and corporeal-
ity” (Roden, 2001, 26). In addition, in Undoing Gender (2004),
Butler acknowledged the lack of attention paid to trans activism in
Gender Trouble and looked at the burgeoning trans movement as
the basis for a new gender politics.
Despite the unquestionable influence of Butler’s work, she has
also been widely criticized, particularly by other feminists. For
example, Nussbaum (1999) presents a number of critiques of Butler
in an article for The New Republic. According to Nussbaum, Butler
neglects to engage thoroughly with important literature; there is
a lack of acknowledgment of and discussion about the contradic-
tions between theorists from which she draws her arguments.
Nussbaum was also displeased with the ways in which Butler’s
work steps back from the activism and real-world applicability that
permeates through so much other feminist theoretical work. From
Nussbaum’s perspective, Butler’s work too often remains noncom-
mittal and abstract. As structures of power are framed as ubiqui-
tous, Butler’s work does not properly acknowledge or contribute
to the feminist movement’s concern with women’s material condi-
tions (Nussbaum, 1999).
Academics engaged with transgender topics have something
to say about Gender Trouble as well. Namaste (2000) argues that
Butler’s work remains too abstract and is divorced from trans
people’s lived experience. She believes that Gender Trouble fails

to take into account the context in which certain types of gender
performances take place and the limitations that these contexts
pose. For example, she argues that although claims for radical
gender expressions are important, but such theorizations down-
play real risks attached to gender transgression in everyday life,
such as the threat of transphobic violence. Also, Prosser (2006)
argues that queer theorists such as Butler have celebrated (and
relied upon) transgender subjectivities that comfortably support
the performativity argument, while disfavoring or even dismissing
transsexual narratives as essentialist. He argues that transgressive
gender expressions are celebrated in Butler’s work at the expense
of those expressions that fall on either side of the binary. As Butler
seeks to break down conventional (binary) expressions of gender,
Prosser believes that her work ultimately enforces a hierarchy in its
own right with regard to trans subjectivities.
I ntersectionality and Transgender

S tudies
As demonstrated in this review of the literature, academic disci-
plines such as sexology, biology, psychology, and feminist theory
have conceptualized gender variance in unique and sometimes
contradictory ways. Despite headway made by second wave femi-
nists to loosen the boundaries of gender, in the view of Whittle,
feminist theory has “consistently failed to afford transgender
people a voice” (2002, 81). Emerging from a discursive turn in
feminist and postmodern theories, queer theory has begun to pro-
vide a space for trans voices to converge. Influenced by the work
of Foucault, queer theory set out to disrupt and undermine the
binary foundations of modernist thought (Whittle, 2002). It is
interested in expanding the scope of inquiry from looking at gay
men and lesbians (as representative of sexuality) and women (as
representative of gender), to include other sexualities and genders
falling outside of the norm.
In addition, transgender subjectivity and relevant sociopolitical
issues began to gain academic credence in the early 1990s. This
took place because of a combination of activism, postmodern/
queer theories, challenges to traditional ideas about gender and
sexuality, tabloid interest, and popular culture (Hines, 2007).
Recently, transgender studies has emerged as a field that takes a

multidisciplinary approach to the subject. Under its remit, Stryker
explains:
Transgender studies, as we understand it, is the academic field

that claims as its purview transsexuality and cross-dressing, some
aspects of intersexuality and homosexuality, cross-cultural and his-
torical investigations of human gender diversity, myriad specific
sub-cultural expressions of “gender atypicality,” theories of sexed
embodiment and subjective gender identity development, law and
public policy related to the regulation of gender expression, and
many similar issues. (2006, 3)
The discipline of transgender studies expands the remit of study

beyond the traditional models and allows for more accurate and
pointedly respectful work on the topic of gender variance.9
Nonbinary Understandings
The field of medicine has appeared particularly tied to binary
thinking. Hird (2002) argues that hegemonic psychomedical dis-
course relies upon a strictly two-gender paradigm. Some contem-
porary social science theorists and researchers, however, challenge
binary distinctions, believing them inadequate to explain the
panoply of gender identities and expressions. Halberstam (2005)
asserts that the ways in which nonnormative gender expressions
shifted in medical discourse from homosexuality to transsexuality,
along with the present-day descriptions of same-sex relationships,
serve to reinforce binary understandings of gender. Hines (2007)
argues that approaches to transgender people have also tended to
rely upon heteronormative frameworks. Hird (2002) sees a shift in
understandings of transsexualism from authenticity to performa-
tivity. Noting that gender authenticity is consistently the subject
of medical research focus, Hird posits that “psychological analyses
of transsexualism focus on the issue of authenticity because the
discipline remains wedded to sex and gender as coherent, stable
and ‘real’ concepts” (2002, 578).
Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw is one of the most widely
quoted manifestos for breaking down the boundaries of gender.
Like Lorber (2000) and Tausig, Michello, and Subedi (1999),
Bornstein considers binary gender to be the structure through
which power dynamics produce sexist (and transphobic) oppres-

sion. She proposes that gender
could be seen as a class system. By having gender around, there

are these two classes—male and female. As in any binary, one
side will always have more power than the other. One will always
oppress the other. The value of the two gender system is nothing
more than the value of keeping the power imbalance, and all that
depends on that, intact. (1994, 113)
Bornstein’s work in Gender Outlaw comments on binary gender

categories from a transgender subjective space. She argues for a
third option and encourages us to envisage “a society free from
the constraints of non-consensual gender” (1994, 111).
B odies
Gender complexity is not the only phenomenon under consider-
ation; physical complexity is important as well. In the literature,
medicine has tended to view gender in terms of its relationship
to the physical body. When the concept of gender is used, it has
implied a split into two discrete binary categories that parallel
male/female sex classifications. As the work of Bornstein shows
us that gender exists on a spectrum, the work of Fausto-Sterling
(2000b) and others demonstrates that physical sex falls across a
range as well. Although the two-sex idea is embedded deeply in
Western social and legal culture, there are in fact a number of
gradations between male and female. Intersex people can have
several different chromosomal, hormonal, or gonadal configura-
tions. Thus, Fausto-Sterling argues that a two-sex system denies
the complexity that exists in nature.
Even where sexual diversity extends beyond male and female, as
is the case when people have intersex reproductive or sexual anat-
omy, treatment options are framed in ways that reflect and rein-
force binary divisions. Rather than making room for difference,
though, doctors have been compelling intersex people to “choose
an established gender role and stick with it” since the Middle Ages
(Fausto-Sterling, 2000a, 115). She argues that 1960s medical dis-
course about intersex people painted their lives as miserable, lonely,
and freakish—claims that were without empirical basis. Intersex
people have been expected to conform to heterosexual and binary
existences. At the behest of doctors, many parents chose surgery

for intersex babies to move their bodies into either male or female
categories.
Fausto-Sterling rejects the quest for uniformity; she contends
that this desire fulfills a cultural need rather than a natural one.
Surgical treatment should be offered at the age where the patient
is able to understand and consent to procedures, and should be
planned cooperatively with the physician, the patient, and other
specialists in gender diversity. So, in Bornstein, we hear a call to
open up our understanding of gender and in Fausto-Sterling, we
equally hear a call to open up our understanding of physical sex.
Social scientists often see gender very differently. Binary gender,
upon which most medical discourses are predicated, has been
challenged by social scientists as being insufficient in articulating
the range of experiences that humans have with gender. Rather,
social scientists have often focused their attention upon the ways
in which gender is discussed, developed, and conceptualized in
the social world. Arising from this work is a school of thought that
argues that gender is fluid and/or socially constructed.
C onclusion
This chapter has highlighted the various ways in which sex, gen-
der, gender identity, and gender variance have been conceptualized
in the medical and social sciences. These concepts have ambigu-
ous, contested meanings that have shifted rapidly in response to
the emergence of new and interesting scholarship. Medical science
has attributed gender variance to hormonal, chromosomal, social,
and/or behavioral causes. Social science has interpreted gender as
a tool of the state, a class, a process, and a performance. Gender
has been conceptualized as binary or existing along a spectrum.
Evidence from the literature suggests that gender variant people
engaged with health services have contended with intersectional
oppression. Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia have influ-
enced the interpretation of what it means to be a man, woman, or
someone who identifies in between. At times, the medical model
has responded inadequately to the complex realities of gender vari-
ant people’s lives. Doctors have presented a host of erroneous or
inaccurate expectations to those who experience their gender dif-
ferently to the labels assigned to them at birth. Despite this, many
gender variant people are invested heavily in accessing services

using the medical model and consider such treatments essential
in articulating themselves to the outside world. A social construc-
tionist approach presents a different picture of gender variance,
but concerns remain about its adequacy as a full explanation of
gender variant subjectivities, particularly transsexual ones. Post-
structuralism puts forward the important critiques of gender, but
it does not provide adequate spaces for people who feel comfort-
able adhering to the gender binary.
Although there is uncertainty in the literature about how theo-
ries of social construction and performativity intersect with the
medical model, we can see through this review that understand-
ings of sex, gender, and gender identity—namely social/discur-
sive construction and biological theories—have interacted and
informed each other in treatment locations. The disconnection
between the understandings posited by various disciplines compli-
cates our understanding of gender and of medicine’s response to
sex/gender difference. The medical model currently sets the frame
in which gender variant people negotiate physical transition, but a
post-structural analysis of gender can be useful in informing more
respectful and appropriate treatment.
This chapter has focused on a health-care policy gap caused by
ambiguous understandings of gender in medicine. In this case, an
intersectional analysis has been used to consider what lessons we
can learn from stakeholder disciplines. The range of views posited
in different disciplines allows us to see the full picture of health
care for gender variant people more clearly and, I would argue,
respond more effectively. It also highlights that ambiguity makes
policy making difficult. One-size-fits-all policies—especially those
developed in social, cultural, or professional isolation—cannot
adequately address the challenges posed by complex or ambigu-
ous circumstances. Intersectional approaches allow a more full
understanding of a social phenomenon. Thus, they should be
considered as a policy development tool for reconciling cases of
ambiguity.
Notes
1. “Trans” is used here as an umbrella term to refer to people whose
gender identities do not match with the gender they were assigned
at birth. Intersex describes people whose reproductive or sexual
anatomy does not fit into male or female categories. For the pur-
pose of this chapter, I discuss both groups under the heading “gen-
der variant” but, admittedly, this phrase inadequately describes the
nuances of each category.
2. In brief, gender dysphoria is a medical term for the state of discom-
fort with one’s gender.
3. Binary gender is the idea that gender is a dichotomy of men and
women, with no variability or gray area between the two categories.
4. By 1933, fascism had overwhelmed the German state. The Nazis
destroyed Hirschfeld’s institute, its files and books that year.
Hirschfeld—a gay Jewish man—died in exile in France two years
later.
5. The gender clinic model of treating gender dysphoria and intersex
conditions spread across the United States and the United Kingdom
in the 1960s–1970s.
6. Along the same vein, post-structuralist sociologist Viviane Namaste
(2000) warns that limiting discourse about trans lives to psychi-
atric and medical sites results in the erasure of trans people from
many other segments of social life. Ghettoizing trans people to these
spaces, will “reinforce a more general obliteration of TS/TG people
from the social world” (Namaste, 2000, 265).
7. Tausig, Michello, and Subedi (1999) would agree. They see gender
as describing cultural obligations and believe gender is used as a sys-
tem of stratification.
8. While offering insight into the social processes that define the
parameters of gender, the concept of social construction as the sole
source of gender production has proven problematic in certain ways.
There is a danger of justifying the harmful project of gender/sexu-
ality resocialization through reparative therapy (also called conver-
sion therapy), which has been employed by psychiatrists and religious
organizations to reorient LGBT people toward heterosexual, cisgen-
der identities (Exodus International, 2010; Haldeman, 1994). These
treatments are considered risky and ineffective by the major profes-
sional medical associations (American Medical Association, 2010;
American Psychiatric Association, 2000; American Psychological
Association, 2009; Cohen, “British Medical Association,” 2010). In
relation to trans people, it was argued by Benjamin (1966) that psy-
chotherapeutic approaches taken to change transsexual people’s gen-
der identities are unsuccessful. The lack of success in resocializing
trans people’s gender would seem to indicate, at the very least, that
social construction arguments do not capture the complete picture.
Thus, a takeaway point from the contribution of social construction-
ist positions is that they further complicate our understanding of
gender and compound the ambiguity around the subject.
9. Namaste reminds us to avoid distilling gender variant peoples’ lives

and experiences into merely a condition that they embody. She
writes, “research and theory in psychiatry, the social sciences, and
humanities are preoccupied with issues of origin, etiology, cause,
identity, performance, and gender norms. These questions are not
unwarranted, but our lives and our bodies are made up of more than
gender and identity, more than the theory that justifies our very
existence, more than mere performance, more than an interesting
remark that we expose how gender works. Our lives and our bodies
are much more complicated, and much less glamorous, than all that”
(Namaste, 2000, 1).
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7
I n t e r sec t ion a l A na ly sis at t h e

M e dico-L eg a l Bor de r l a n d: H I V
T est i ng I n novat ions a n d t h e
C r i m i na l i z at ion of H I V
Non-Disc l osu r e
Daniel Grace1
H IV testing technologies are evolving, and HIV-related criminal

prosecutions are increasing. A new generation of HIV tests allows
for much earlier detection of infection following the transmission
event. HIV has an increased risk of transmission during the first
eight weeks following infection due to greater infectivity in this very
recent or acute phase (Brenner et al., 2007; Hayes and White, 2005;
Hollingsworth, Anderson, and Fraser, 2008; Pao et al., 2005). As
the Health Initiative for Men (HIM) puts it, HIV is “hottest at the
start” (HIM, 2011). From a public health perspective, the impor-
tance of timely diagnosis during the acute phase is suggested from
various data showing behavior change following an HIV-positive
diagnosis (Marks et al., 2005). As such, the use of “early” HIV
tests has important public health implications for the detection of
HIV and the prevention of onward transmission. This has been the
rationale for using these tests in pilot programs to help address the
high rates of HIV among gay, bisexual, and other men who have
sex with men (MSM)2 in British Columbia (BC), Canada, as well
as in other settings globally (Gilbert et al., 2011). What has not
been thoroughly examined, however, is the possible relationship
between these innovations in laboratory technologies and related
158 Da n i e l G r ac e
HIV testing initiatives and the increasing use of the criminal law to
prosecute alleged cases of HIV non-disclosure in Canada.
Exposing or transmitting HIV to another person can increas-
ingly be subject to criminal prosecution in many areas of the
world (Grace, 2012; Pearshouse, 2008). In the Canadian context,
researchers have noted the intensification of HIV non-disclosure
criminal cases since 2004 (Mykhalovskiy and Betteridge, 2012;
Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge, and McLay, 2010). A growing body
of diverse policy actors argue that criminal approaches to dis-
ease control within and beyond Canada are highly problematic
because they undermine public health efforts while creating a
stigmatized viral underclass (Burris and Cameron, 2008; Eba,
2008; Elliott, 2002; Grace, 2012; Grace and McCaskell, in press;
International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS,
2009; Jü rgens et al., 2009; UNAIDS Reference Group, 2009;
UNDP, 2012).3
Medical technologies have significant implications for policy,
sexuality, and the law. As such, it is important to bring into con-
versation these different, and at times conflictual, approaches
to HIV prevention and governance (e.g., targeted HIV testing
technologies and the application of criminal law powers), which
have remained largely discrete research and policy discussions to
date, in order to elucidate how populations are impacted by such
approaches to public health. I argue that both targeted HIV testing
initiatives and the prosecution of alleged HIV non-disclosure cases
ignore the structural drivers of the epidemic and problematically
frame the “problem” that must be addressed. While testing is an
important albeit insufficient aspect of HIV-prevention efforts, the
increasing trend toward criminalizing HIV non-disclosure cases
in Canada poses significant challenges in scaling up an effective
national and provincial HIV response. This exploratory chapter,
which focuses upon HIV/AIDS responses in British Columbia, is
informed by the Descriptive and Transformative Questions of an
Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) and considers pol-
icy issues and intersectional subject positions at the “medico-legal
borderland”—a field of inquiry that “suggests multiple possibilities
for analysis including investigation of new forms of social control,
the intersection of criminal law and health care governance and
the emergence of hybrid health/crime subjects” (Mykhalovskiy,
2011, 674; Timmermans and Gabe, 2003).
I n t e r s e c t ion a l A n a ly s i s 159
In the first section of this chapter, I review the concept of

intersectionality and argue that this paradigm offers an impor-
tant critical perspective that can help researchers and policy actors
understand complex health issues for diverse populations, includ-
ing gay, bisexual, and other MSM. Next, I explore two discrete
though conceptually related public health issues by explicating
the work of researchers and civil society who are addressing the
need to consider the science of Acute HIV Infection (AHI), HIV
transmission patterns and new testing technologies, and the dan-
ger in shifting to “law and order” approaches that criminalize HIV
non-disclosure cases in Canada. I examine three major descrip-
tive policy factors while reviewing the research evidence and
public health work being conducted in these areas: (1) What
HIV-related “problems” are being addressed; (2) The factors con-
tributing to these representations; and (3) The effects produced by
these approaches (Hankivsky et al., 2012, IBPA Section 1). With
this review presented, I focus on two additional considerations
with a decidedly transformative thrust: (1) Ways to improve these
approaches to the problem and/or mitigate some of the possible
harms caused by these approaches, and (2) Different approaches to
thinking about addressing HIV/AIDS in and beyond the popula-
tion of gay, bisexual, and other MSM (Hankivsky et al., 2012,
IBPA Section 2).
By considering complex public health issues together using an
IBPA Framework, key tensions can be identified within and across
different approaches to HIV/AIDS prevention and governance.
This analysis supports calls for the need to expand access to new
HIV testing technologies in British Columbia in order to increase
awareness of HIV-positive status and detect cases of AHI so as to
support prevention programs and enrollment into treatment pro-
grams; adapt existing prosecutorial guidelines to help eliminate or
reduce the application of the criminal law to cases of alleged HIV
non-disclosure in British Columbia; and meaningfully invest in
HIV-prevention efforts that address the structural drivers of the
epidemic.
M ethod
In this chapter, I use components of an Intersectionality-Based
Policy Analysis (IBPA) Framework to better understand the
complex interplay between medical technologies and legal prob-

lems (Hankivsky et al., 2012). An IBPA Framework draws on
the principles of intersectionality to enable researchers and policy
actors to gain a better understanding of who is benefiting from
(and who is excluded from) health policy goals, priorities, and
related resource allocation. Differing from more traditional sex-
and gender-based analysis and health equity impact assessment
techniques, this intersectionality-based approach requires concur-
rent consideration of the complex relationships between mutually
constituting factors of social location and structural disadvantage
at multiple levels so as to conceptualize determinants of inequity
in and beyond health. The IBPA Framework has two core compo-
nents: (1) a set of guiding principles (intersecting categories, multi-
level analysis, power, reflexivity, time and space, diverse knowledges,
social justice, and equity) and (2) a list of 12 overarching questions
(divided into descriptive and transformative subsets) to help guide,
frame, and shape respective policy analyses. The IBPA guiding
principles are intended to ground the 12 key questions, including
their supporting subquestions, in order to ensure that each is asked
and answered in a way that is consistent with an intersectionality-
informed analysis. While some users of The IBPA Framework will
explore all questions and subquestions to help guide their analysis,
in my chapter I focus on certain questions, tailoring them to fit
the specific policy contexts under investigation. My use and modi-
fication of a subset of these sensitizing questions are traced in the
sections to follow and enable an elucidation of the problem under
investigation and an exploration of the ways that policy responses
may be more intersectional. This represents a first step in apply-
ing intersectionality to a complex policy field that I locate at the
“medico-legal borderland” (Mykhalovskiy, 2011; Timmermans
and Gabe, 2003).
Throughout this analysis I make use of diverse data sources
including various awareness campaign activities committed to
supporting the health and human rights of people infected with
and affected by HIV and AIDS in Canada in order to articulate
the work activities and arguments of this group of heterogeneous
social actors. In doing so, I seek to make explicit the space from
which this intersectionality-based inquiry begins: the commitment
of this paradigm to supporting a social justice agenda (Dhamoon
and Hankivsky, 2011; Hankivsky et al., 2012). In this chapter I
also draw upon qualitative research and policy analysis in this

field with focused attention on the work of two Canadian studies:
(1) Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge, and McLay (2010), who interviewed
key informants in Ontario (n = 53)4; and (2) Grace and MacIntosh
(2010; MacIntosh and Grace, 2010), whose analysis brings the
science and law of HIV transmission into conversation vis-à-vis
insights from HIV-positive and -HIV-negative gay men in British
Columbia (n = 55).
This analysis is informed by my collaborative research experience
with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) team in
the study of acute HIV infection in gay men (2009–present). The
research team is investigating the use of new HIV testing technolo-
gies, including nucleic-acid amplification testing (NAAT), for early
HIV detection and response.5 As part of a much larger research
study, work with this interdisciplinary team has uncovered some
of the ways in which the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure
poses many challenges for people living with HIV/AIDS, pub-
lic health practitioners, and HIV researchers in British Columbia.
For example, the experience of our team working with commu-
nity partners reveals the ways in which conducting HIV research
under the specter of criminalization poses many challenges and
ethical concerns for researchers and community-based organiza-
tions (CBOs). Previous work and ongoing transnational research
has informed my thinking in this field and allowed access to key
texts and empirical data used in this analysis (Grace 2012; Grace
and Hankivsky, 2011; Grace and MacIntosh, 2010; MacIntosh
and Grace, 2010).
I ntersectionality and Sexuality

To begin, I define intersectionality as a theoretical approach and
mode of inquiry that can help to illuminate and interpret complex
systems of power, penalty, and privilege (Crenshaw, 1991, 1997;
Grace, 2010; Hankivsky and Christoffersen, 2008; McCall, 2005;
Weber, 2001). Theories of intersectionality offer important chal-
lenges for HIV/AIDS researchers, social theorists, activists, and
policy actors when they seek to conceptualize categories and exam-
ine systems of inequity. In short, categories must not be reified,
and intersectionality is a sensitizing paradigm that allows one to
make sense of complexity and difference in the everyday world.
Researchers of intersectionality work to critically explore the inter-

sections of multiple axes and levels of oppression and privilege so
as to elucidate aspects of identity, social difference, and structural
inequity (Winker and Degele, 2011). The simultaneous, interde-
pendent interactions of factors such as gender (expression), sex,
sexuality, ethnicity, class, indigeneity, HIV status, age, and (dis)
ability must be considered within the context of broader structures
and systems of oppression, including, but not limited to, racism,
sexism, colonialism, and heterosexism.
This approach can expand critically upon social determinants
of health research paradigms by focusing attention to ques-
tions of power, history, complexity, and relationality (Grace and
Hankivsky, 2011). While subjective lived experiences of inequity
must be accounted for, one must not lose sight of the complex
structural conditions and power asymmetries that help to produce
health disparities. The pathways to health inequity are not always
straightforward, and a lens of intersectionality helps to foreground
the urgency of attending to the messiness and complexity of the
social world in order to provide richer and more accurate accounts
that can inform evidence-based policy responses.
Intersectionality can help make visible the kinds of mutually
constituting intersections that must be considered in complex pol-
icy fields. Theoretically expanding upon the oppression-focused
“matrix of domination” (Collins, 2000), an IBPA demands that
policy actors consider the complex, dialectical nature between
systems of penalty and privilege and the individuals and groups
who have intersectional standpoints along various social identi-
ties and lived actualities (e.g., racialized gay men). The concept
of an “intersectional standpoint” (or intersectional subject posi-
tions) that I advance here builds upon the heritage of standpoint
feminism and critical race theory in the work of Collins (Collins,
1998, 2000; Smith, 2004). I argue that rather than focus on the
centrality of one unitary category to understand lived experience
(e.g., women’s standpoint; see Smith, 2004) intersectional stand-
point brings into focus that multiple systems and social identities
(e.g., gay men who are differentially raced and classed) simultane-
ously inform the place from which subjects view and experience
the world—including their experiences of health policy.
Thinking about how we use categories of most-at-risk popula-
tion (MARPs) in policy strategies—e.g., what groups like “gay,”
“MSM,” or “Black MSM” may reveal and/or erase—is important

in this field of inquiry. The policy effects of so-called behavior
or epidemiological categories, such as MSM and WSW (women
who have sex with women), must also be considered. Young
and Meyer (2005) discuss how the use of categories can lead
to the erasure of sexual minorities, arguing that the “purport-
edly neutral terms” of MSM and WSW are highly problematic
insofar as “they obscure social dimensions of sexuality; under-
mine the self-labeling of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people; and
do not sufficiently describe variations in sexual behavior” (1144).
Furthermore, I agree with Hindman (2011), who argues that we
must not fractionalize social groups by “treating formerly broad
descriptive categories such as ‘woman’ or ‘African-American’ as
smaller, internally-coherent empirical units” (190). This is con-
sistent with an IBPA approach, as IBPAs emphasize heterogene-
ity and context-specific analysis.
A limited amount of scholarship in this interdisciplinary field
of intersectionality has addressed explicitly issues of sexuality and
HIV status among gay and bisexual men (Meyer et al., 2011; Taylor,
Hines, and Casey, 2011). For example, in a recent critical review of
intersectional theorizing, Hindman (2011) notes the conceptual
complexity of dealing with questions of intersectionality:
Within LGBTQ political mobilization, in-group marginalization

does not fall neatly along lines of race, ethnicity, or gender, though
intersectionality has undertaken the important and significant task
of shedding light on these imbalances. Beyond descriptive traits lie
complex issues of desire, self-affirmation, in-group contestation,
and individual and collective expectations, all of which coalesce
to determine not only which people, but also which practices and
which political interests comprise the group. The tortuous his-
tory of signification offers a powerful testament to the agonism,
compromise, and complexity that characterize the discourse on
LGBTQ sexuality. (205)
IBPA has the potential to take intersectionality work on sexuality

and HIV further because it requires that the discourse of policy
problems be critically analyzed; that groups who are adversely
affected by dominant policy frameworks be identified; and that
policy interventions that come from affected stakeholders be inte-
grated meaningfully.
IBPA Part 1 (D escriptive): The “Problem”

Being Addressed, the Reason for
this and the Effects of
this Approach
In offering a discussion of two approaches to HIV prevention and
governance, first, I review the use of new HIV testing technolo-
gies in British Columbia to detect AHI. This approach to HIV
constructs the HIV-related problem to be both high viral loads
during early stage of infection (which leads to a significant pro-
portion of new HIV infections), and high rates of HIV among
MSM, with many being unaware of HIV-positive status. Second,
I discuss the context in which these tests are taking place: a cli-
mate of increased criminalization of alleged HIV non-disclosure.
I argue that this criminalization approach to public health con-
structs the HIV-related problem to be the people living with HIV
who do not disclose their HIV status to sexual partners, which
puts these partners at risk of HIV infection. Table 7.1 acts as a
summary of some of the key descriptive questions adapted from
the IBPA sensitizing framework: (1) What is the “problem” being
addressed?; (2) How has this representation of the “problem” come
about?; and (3) What effects are produced by this approach to the
“problem?”
Acute HIV i nfection and HIV Testing:

“Hottest at the Start”
Growing evidence strongly suggests that a significant proportion
of all new HIV infections arise from individuals with AHI, who
have very recently acquired the virus. During this stage of infec-
tion, persons with AHI may be up to 26 times more infectious
compared to those in later stages of infection (Hollingsworth,
Anderson, and Fraser, 2008). Research explicates that depending
on the stage of the epidemic, partner concurrency, and the rate
of partner change, between 11 and 49 percent of new HIV infec-
tions may occur during this approximately eight-week period of
“hyper-infection” (Brenner et al., 2007; Hayes and White, 2005;
Pao et al., 2005). This knowledge, coupled with an awareness of
the high concentration of HIV among gay, bisexual, and other
MSM in British Columbia has led for calls to raise awareness of
AHI among this heterogeneous group of men.
Table 7.1 Descriptive IBPA Questions
Modified IBPA Questions, Section 1 Targeted Testing for Acute HIV Infection Criminalization of HIV non-disclosure
What is the “problem” being addressed? • High viral loads during early stage of infection leads • People living with HIV who do not disclose
to significant proportion of new HIV infections their HIV status to sexual partners and put
• High rates of HIV among MSM (with many being them at significant risk of HIV infection
unaware of HIV-positive status)
How has this representation of the • Scientific advances in testing technologies that • Sensational media stories construct ideas
“problem” come about? shorten the “window period” between HIV of many “evil” and “reckless” perpetrators
transmission and being able to detect the infection who intend to transmit HIV
• Body of research on the significance of AHI to HIV • NO research demonstrating efficacy of
transmission rates criminalizing non-disclosure in preventing
• Provincial, national, and international focus on HIV transmission
biomedical solutions to HIV prevention • Provincial, national, and international
trends demonstrate increasing
criminalization of HIV non-disclosure
What effects are produced by this • Many positive effects from the viewpoint of • NO positive effects from a equity and
approach to the “problem?” detecting HIV infections earlier: demonstrated public health perspective
efficacy in detecting cases of HIV that would have • Stigmatizes people living with HIV
been missed by other testing technologies6 and leads to the social construction of
• Limited access to new tests along lines of geography criminals and victims along intersecting
(only available in urban settings in Vancouver) and categories of “race,” immigration status,
sexual behavior (to gay, bisexual, and other MSM) gender, and HIV status
• Need to secure funding to ensure continued access • High rates of prosecution among racialized
to tests at the end of the CIHR research project heterosexual men; trend indicating an
increase in the prosecutions of gay men
Continued
Table 7.1 Continued
• Increased community-based awareness campaigns of • Creates a barrier for researchers and
AHI and testing options for some key populations health service providers
(must assess if knowledge is lower among some • Confusion among people living with
groups than others) HIV of legal obligations to disclose
• Supports a biomedical-focused approach to HIV HIV status and about the meaning of
prevention in a climate of “treatment as prevention” “significant risk”
logic
• Criminalization of HIV non-disclosure stigmatizes people living with HIV and may
serve as a deterrent to getting tested for HIV
• Increased HIV testing and AHI detection could lead to increased HIV non-disclosure
cases among specific populations, including gay, bisexual, and other MSM
• Both of these approaches to HIV prevention and governance ignore the structural
drivers of the epidemic.
The HIM has developed a useful summary of salient health

information that gay, bisexual, and other MSM in British Columbia
should know about AHI and HIV testing. The key points they
highlight help to elucidate the work of community organizations
trying to translate complex health messages to publics in acces-
sible ways.7 The accompanying public health campaign—featur-
ing advertisements on free condom packs, magazines, bathroom
stalls, bus shelters, and online—explains that HIV is “hottest at
the start” and a “powerhouse in the sack” in the early stages of
infection.
This campaign has been informed partially by qualitative
research conducted with gay men in Vancouver and Victoria (Grace
and MacIntosh, 2010; MacIntosh and Grace, 2010). Among other
factors, the intersections of age, geography (living in urban or rural
parts of the province), and HIV status were important categories.
For example, MacIntosh and Grace point to different knowledge
levels of HIV prevention and testing access according to these
intersectional factors. This qualitative research highlights the con-
fusion for many gay men in the meaning of different HIV testing
terminology (e.g., “rapid” HIV tests versus “early” HIV tests) and
window periods (e.g., how long one has to wait after a risk event to
get tested for HIV) (Grace and MacIntosh, 2010; MacIntosh and
Grace, 2010). MacIntosh and Grace (2010) argue that many gay
men appear to be “waiting out the window”: waiting 3–6 months
after a risk event based on outdated information about HIV test-
ing windows.8 Knowledge translation and exchange (KTE), along
with a commitment to developing feasible short-, medium-, and
long-term solutions, is central to the transformative commitments
of an IBPA. This is a small example of the collective efforts of
researchers to work in ways consistent with the paradigm of inter-
sectionality through ongoing collaborations with CBOs to help
have best available evidence inform HIV testing and prevention
activities in the region.
It is important to recognize the many positive effects of new
testing campaigns from the viewpoint of detecting HIV infections
earlier. For example, researchers have demonstrated efficacy in
detecting cases of HIV that would have been missed by other test-
ing technologies (Gilbert et al., 2011). However, limited access to
new tests along lines of geography (only being available in urban
settings in Vancouver) and sexual behavior (only to gay, bisexual,
and other MSM) must be further considered through the lens of

intersectionality. Securing funding to ensure the continued avail-
ability of tests is also required. Finally, as already discussed, it is
important to acknowledge the extent to which this testing initia-
tive supports a biomedical-focused approach to HIV prevention in
a climate of “treatment as prevention” logic in and beyond British
Columbia.
The C riminalization of HIV Non-Disclosure :

“The Creep of Criminalization ”
In 1998 the Supreme Court of Canada found that a man from
British Columbia was guilty of assault (including sexual assault
or aggravated sexual assault) for not disclosing his HIV-positive
status before having sex where a significant risk of transmis-
sion existed. The Cuerrier decision created precedence for other
HIV non-disclosure cases across Canada, as the Criminal Code
is federal law (Betteridge, 2009; Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal
Network, 2011). In Canada one does not need to transmit HIV
to be charged; only the “significant risk” of transmission through
exposure to the virus must be determined. Much has been writ-
ten about the confusion in the current legal landscape in Canada,
including under which circumstances a person must disclose one’s
HIV-positive status (Betteridge, 2009; Symington, 2009). For
example, while vaginal and anal intercourse without a condom
seems to meet the significant risk of transmission test set out in
Cuerrier, many ambiguities exist regarding disclosure obligations
when condoms are used, viral loads are low, and/or the sexual
behavior has a low risk for transmission (e.g., oral sex).9 At present,
British Columbia’s attorney general has a four-page policy manual
related to HIV transmission with its section on aggravated sexual
assault citing the Cuerrier decision.10
A significant intensification of HIV non-disclosure criminal
cases in Canada has been observed since 2004 (Mykhalovskiy and
Betteridge, 2012; Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge, and McLay, 2010).
From 1989 to 2009, 98 individuals in Canada were charged
with criminal offenses (resulting in 104 charges) related to HIV
non-disclosure (Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge, and McLay, 2010;
see Grace and Macintosh, 2010). By September 2011 this num-
ber had risen to more than 120 people living with HIV being
charged.11 An escalation in the severity of charges laid, media

attention to criminal HIV cases, and overall anxiety and debate
within the “HIV community” has also been observed in Canada
(Larcher and Symington, 2010, 3; Grace and McCaskell, in press).
British Columbia has the third highest number of people being
charged in HIV non-disclosure cases after Ontario and Quebec
(Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge, and McLay, 2010, 10; Mykhalovskiy
and Betteridge, 2012). When disaggregating HIV non-disclosure
cases in British Columbia by sex, it is clear that the majority of
persons accused are men (12 men; 2 women; 1989–2010). Further
disaggregating by sex and ethnicity revels, three Caucasian men
being charged, three Black men, and six men of unknown eth-
nicity. In cases of women, one was Aboriginal and the other of
unknown ethnicity.12 While some of the data on ethnicity is miss-
ing or unavailable, this previously unpublished information on
British Columbia charges may point to a disproportionally high
number of black men being charged in non-disclosure cases, echo-
ing trends in the rest of the country. For example, Mykhalovskiy,
Betteridge, and McLay (2010) discuss the large number of charges
against black heterosexual defendants in Ontario and argue:
Understanding the large number of recent cases involving Black

male defendants requires careful consideration of the sexual cul-
tures in which they participate and the organization of HIV non-
disclosure therein. It also requires a deeper understanding of how
police and Crown prosecutors respond to Black male defendants.
(13; see Larcher and Symington, 2010)
Current advocacy work related to HIV non-disclosure is focus-

ing on how racialized men are being constructed as “criminals”
in Canada (Larcher and Symington, 2010; see Davis, 2007) and
why the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure may be particu-
larly dangerous for women in the context of sub-Saharan Africa
(Armien, 2008; Open Society Institute, 2008; Grace, 2012).
The majority of defendants in British Columbia have been cases
where men have been charged with not disclosing their status to
women (n = 11). To date there has only been one known case of a
man not disclosing his status to a same-sex sexual partner (n = 1; 2
cases unknown) (Betteridge and Mykhalovskiy, 2011). However,
analysis of recent demographic patterns reveals an overall increase
in Canada with respects to the number of criminal cases involv-

ing gay or bisexual men being accused of HIV non-disclosure
(Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge, and McLay, 2010, 13).
Drawing on research with people living with HIV and service
providers in Ontario, Mykhalovskiy (2011) has contributed to the
scant empirical data in this field finding:
(1) the concept of significant risk poses serious problems to risk

communication in HIV counseling and contributes to contra-
dictory advice about disclosure obligations;
(2) criminalization discourages PHAs’ [people living with HIV]
openness about HIV non-disclosure in counseling relation-
ships; and
(3) the recontextualization of public health interpretations of
signi ﬁcant risk in criminal proceedings can intensify crimi-
nalization. (668)
This research makes explicit the unintended consequences of

discursive vagueness and relates to proceedings currently before
the Supreme Court of Canada (cases from Manitoba and Quebec)
where the issue of significant risk is central.13 Further, the above
points build upon the descriptive statistics presented earlier
(Betteridge and Mykhalovskiy, 2011) and the work calling for a
review of policy options in Ontario (Mykhalovskiy, Betteridge,
and McLay, 2010; Grace and McCaskell, in press).
Research by Grace and MacIntosh (2010) focused on the
knowledge and concerns of HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay
men related to AHI and the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure.
The qualitative component of this research project involved 55
face-to-face interviews conducted during the spring and sum-
mer of 2009 in British Columbia. A portion of these informants
(n = 23) specifically discussed concerns about the criminalization
of HIV exposure and/or transmission in the Canadian context.
Few men were aware of the increased risk of HIV transmission
during the early phase following infection, or of innovations in
HIV testing technology that can shorten the “window” between
HIV infection and detection. As respondents discussed issues
related to the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure in Canada,
themes of responsibility and intersectional stigmas, and questions
regarding the meaning of significant risk and legal repercussions
of non-disclosure to sexual partners dominated the men’s narra-

tives. Men articulated both why disclosure of one’s HIV status is
important and how it can be highly problematic to disclose. Just
as men sought to have the science of AHI explained, many men
discussed knowledge gaps and ambiguities related to HIV legal
issues and AHI.
When specifically discussing legal issues and practices of HIV
disclosure, three main themes emerged from the qualitative inter-
views regarding why the disclosure of one’s HIV-positive status
to (potential) sexual partners is problematic. First, many men do
not know their HIV status, or they may be in denial of their
HIV-positive status. Second, practices of disclosure—such as the
language used between men when discussing their HIV status, or
the meaning of using or not using condoms—can be unclear or
misunderstood. For example, men highlighted how the language
used between potential sexual partners can be confusing. One
man explained that a lot of men say—online or in person—that
“I’m safe” or “I’m clean.” This man questioned what such utter-
ances may camouflage: “‘I’m clean’—what does that mean? . . . and
a lot of guys will go with that word” (47 year old, HIV negative).
Work by the HIV/AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario (HALCO) sup-
ports how disclosure of HIV status may be confusing or misread
by sexual partners (2008, 22). Betteridge (2009) puts it this way:
“If you are going to disclose your HIV status to your sex partner,
make it count. Avoid code words or hints like ‘poz’ and ‘positive’”
(para. 5). Third, the appropriate method by which to record how
and when someone discloses their status to sexual partners was
seen as unclear or unrealistic by many men (Betteridge, 2009;
HALCO, 2008). An IBPA demands that this kind of knowledge
is included within the policy process in order to better understand
how that which may be conceived of as simple in a policy (e.g.,
disclosure of HIV status) is rendered complicated by the contin-
gencies of everyday life.
Finally, the extent to which “intersectional stigmas” may be
produced due to mutually informing epidemics—or syndemics —
of HIV, criminalization, and heterosexism is worth interrogating.
The concept of intersectional stigmas can allow researchers and
policy actors to understand unintended policy effects and unpack
the ways in which HIV stigma intersects and coconstitutes other
kinds of socially constructed (criminalization-related) stigmas and
related structural opportunities for political participation. For

example, Berger (2004) explicates how stigmas intersect within
social structure among HIV-positive and HIV-negative female sex
workers and drug users: “Their experience of stigma that incorpo-
rates sexuality, race, class, and gender helps us to ascertain their
unique responses to their struggle en route to political partici-
pation” (30). Early HIV research noted the relative privilege of
white, middle-class gay men, who had more economic and cultural
capital than other infected groups, including those within other
gay and lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered networks (Epstein,
1991). Current intersectionality research addressing funding
regimes of gay men’s health calls into question the extent to which
researchers, CBOs, and AIDS service organizations (ASOs) have
been able to gain the material and economic resources to effec-
tively mobilize a proportional response to the state of the HIV
epidemic in British Columbia for gay, bisexual, and other MSM
(Ferlatte, 2012; see Aguinaldo, 2008). Policy actors must consider
the extent to which policy approaches can meaningfully address
intersectional stigmas and inequities, promote social justice, and
not reinforce stereotypes, biases, or produce further inequities.
IBPA Part 2 ( Transformative): Possible

Improvements to Current Approaches
and Other Ways of Addressing the
Public Health Issue
Emerging research, primarily based in the United States, the
United Kingdom, and Canada, is clarifying the many problems
with trying to prevent the spread of HIV within a culture of
increased criminalization (Adam et al., 2008; Burris et al., 2007;
Dodds, Bourne, and Weait, 2009; Galletly, DiFranceisco, and
Pinkerton, 2009; National Aids Trust, 2011). Building on the
analysis above, and employing the lens of IBPA, I offer an over-
view of some possible ways to improve these existing approaches
to the problem, as well as potential ways to think about this public
health issue differently, including the need to address structural
drivers of the epidemic and understand the relationships across
medical and legal state apparatuses. Table 7.2 addresses two addi-
tional IBPA questions in order to synthesize some of the key
transformative tensions within and across the two public health
Table 7.2 Transformative IBPA Questions
What needs to be done to improve this • Wider and continued availability of tests to • Greatly reduce the application of the criminal
approach to the problem? detect AHI (ensure all people who could benefit law to cases of HIV non-disclosure, recognizing
have access to the test by removing barriers such that only in exceptional cases does the law
as geographic availability) have a role to play (e.g., where intentional and
• Continued partnerships and support of successful HIV transmission actually occurs);
community-based organizations (CBOs) and follow key international policy guidelines
AIDS service organizations (ASOs) (UNAIDS/UNDP, 2008; UNDP, 2012)
• Continued medical and psychosocial support of • Support calls to develop prosecutorial
newly infected persons (this includes giving clear guidelines (Crown Council Policy Manual) at
information about the state of the science and the provincial level to define the scope of the
the law, including the disclosure responsibilities law and clarify the meaning of “significant
of people living with HIV) risk” based on best available scientific
evidence; engage with civil society groups
and people living with HIV in this process
• Responsible reporting by police and media
outlets that does not stigmatize people in
alleged HIV non-disclosure cases
Continued
Table 7.2 Continued
Can the problem be thought about • Understanding HIV transmission requires attending to the broader social and
differently? structural conditions which produce differential vulnerabilities for infection
• This way of approaching the problem is compatible with a critical social determinants
of health perspective and places emphasis on equity, social justice, complex power
relations, and the context-specific nature of HIV risk and resilience
What are the structural and political • Canadian and international public health funding largely focused on biomedical
challenges of doing so? approaches to HIV prevention
• Narrow policy focus on the risk behaviors of individuals and groups
• Stigma around HIV and other intersections of vulnerability (e.g., sexual orientation,
gender expression, sex work, drug use)
• Financial constraints and competition for limited resources
• The need to both fund and make use of research in policy making (including qualitative,
mixed-methods and community-based research) to better understand the unique needs
of populations along diverse intersections of vulnerability.
approaches reviewed: (1) What needs to be done to improve this

approach to the “problem?” and (2) Can the “problem” be thought
about differently and what are the structural and political chal-
lenges in doing so? I build upon material presented in Table 7.2 in
the discussion that follows, by paying focused attention to calls
for prosecutorial guidelines that would reduce or eliminate the
use of the criminal law in alleged cases of HIV non-disclosure.
Intersectionality adds necessary complexity when considering
issues of sexuality, science, HIV/AIDS, public health, and the law.
Policy actors must address questions of relationality and complex-
ity so as to account for the broader conditions in which health
differences are organized. The IBPA Framework used in this pre-
liminary analysis may help to spark such critical policy thinking.
In addition, it should facilitate finding ways to safeguard all people
from the potential social and legal ramifications of an acute HIV
diagnosis, including those with heightened vulnerability due to
their intersectional subject positions. On a related front, it high-
lights how the use of intersections and the social determinants
of health language could become mainstreamed in global HIV/
AIDS texts such as a recent UNAIDS report in which the authors
emphasize the need to address a confluence of intersecting factors
related to HIV vulnerability:
The intersection between social exclusion, inequality and HIV risk

underscores the need to address the epidemic’s social dimensions.
Without courageous action to alleviate the social roots of HIV risk
and vulnerability, it will be impossible to reach global HIV goals.
(UNAIDS, 2011, 38)
More research is needed to examine the relationship between

new HIV testing technologies and the criminalization of HIV
non-disclosure, and intersectionality-informed analysis may be
helpful in this work. For example, while the gay men interviewed
in Grace and MacIntosh’s (2010) analysis had much expert knowl-
edge to share, many expressed a lack of knowledge regarding
AHI, new HIV testing technologies, and the specifics of how
criminal law is being applied to cases of HIV non-disclosure in
Canada. These knowledge gaps point to areas were increasing the
health and legal literacy of gay, bisexual, and other MSM could
support community and public health goals. The relationship
between criminalization and access to treatment, care, and sup-

port must also be further examined. As Mykhalovskiy (2011) has
argued:
In a perverse fashion, rather than promoting openness, criminal-

ization has made it more difficult to provide meaningful HIV pre-
vention counseling and support about HIV non-disclosure. While
the use of the criminal law may be warranted in some circum-
stances, the expansive use of a vague legal concept of significant
risk does little good either for preventing HIV transmission or for
the credibility of the criminal justice system. (675)
In addition, further research is required to explore other related

issues of criminalization and HIV testing technologies, including
the complex field of phylogenetic analysis, which considers how
two or more HIV strains are related (NAT, 2011).
The work of organizations such as HIM, among others, must
continue to be supported, as they are working to raise awareness
of HIV and AHI in British Columbia alongside efforts to support
sex-positive messaging that targets determinants of health, such
as heterosexism. For example, HIM has spearheaded campaigns
that address broader determinants of gay men’s health and recog-
nize the role of the law as one distal determinant. HIM launched
the “Vancouver/Fabulous since 1969 ” campaign during the 2010
Olympics, which included posters reading: “Gay love has been legal
in Canada since 1969, protected by the Constitution since 1992 and
celebrated with marriage since 2005.”14 Focusing only on bio-
medical solutions to HIV can risk framing the problem of HIV
transmission as one that exists only at the individual level of risk,
rather than focusing on the structural conditions that produce dif-
ferential risks along complex intersections of social identity and
location. While the law can support health equity, it can play a
highly problematic role in criminalizing people living with HIV,
creating stigma, and negatively impacting population health (see
Aguinaldo, 2008; Burris, 2011; UNDP, 2012).
In the context of large-scale efforts to increase HIV testing in
Canada, a growing number of groups have worked to articulate
why the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure is a problem in
Canada. For example, AIDS ACTION NOW! along with more
than a dozen ASOs has supported the call of the Ontario Working
Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure (CLHE) to ask for
prosecutorial guidelines for cases of HIV non-disclosure, believ-

ing that
guidelines are needed to ensure that HIV-related criminal com-

plaints are handled in a fair and non-discriminatory manner. The
guidelines must ensure that decisions to investigate and prosecute
such cases are informed by a complete and accurate understanding
of current medical and scientific research about HIV and take into
account the social contexts of living with HIV. (CLHE, 2011, 1)
Like HIM’s aforementioned work on AHI, this campaign has

endeavored to translate key issues in accessible and actionable ways
while making use of the best available, albeit limited, criminal-
ization-related scientific evidence in the Canadian context (Grace
and McCaskell, in press).15 This awareness campaign is part of the
work of a growing community of transnational actors focusing
on issues of justice and equity in order to raise attention to why
the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure is problematic (Larcher
and Symington, 2010; Grace, 2012).
ASOs and advocacy groups are working to consider how the
blunt force of the criminal law is both ineffective and may be
increasingly dangerous for some subsets of the population, within
and beyond the Canada context. I argue that applying the lens of
intersectionality is a natural extension of the kind of thinking and
advocacy that many ASOs and community groups are conducting
as part of their efforts to problematize the application of the crimi-
nal law to cases of alleged HIV non-disclosure. To date, the initia-
tives I cite have not explicitly invoked the language or paradigm
of intersectionality, and more research is required in this field to
better understand how systems of penalty and privilege may result
in differential impacts and applications of the criminal law and
experiences of intersectional stigma.
Echoing calls in Ontario for prosecutorial guidelines, Positive
Living BC chair Glyn Townson recently explained the need for
such a text in British Columbia: “The bottom line is we want
everyone to have an enjoyable, full sex life, and making criminals
out of people for natural human behaviour is a little bit problem-
atic” (quoted in Christopher, 2011, para. 2). Thinking about this
issue from an intersectional perspective, policy actors could ques-
tion the extent to which some intersectional subjects may be more
likely to be criminalized and stigmatized by increasing targeted
testing practices, prosecutions, and media spectacle. The short-

ened window period between a risk event and positive test result
makes it increasingly likely that people have a better idea of how
they were infected with HIV and who may have infected them.
The extent to which this may lead to increased charges within the
gay community is unknown. While biomedical solutions to HIV
prevention and treatment are important, the current (dominant)
logic of treatment as prevention does little (if anything) to address
the social and structural determinants of heath for sexual minori-
ties, including gay, bisexual, and other MSM. In fact, structural
factors, including the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure,
support systems of oppression, marginalization, and health dis-
parity. Rather than simply posit gay, bisexual, and other MSM
as homogeneous MARPs, policy actors could consider both the
heterogeneity of this population and the role of distal systems of
privilege and penalty in Canada. Such work requires that complex,
historically situated factors, including, but not limited to, colo-
nialism, heterosexism, capitalism, and patriarchy be meaningfully
considered as part of the HIV response, and IBPA promises a rich
resource to address these specificities and complexities.
C onclusion
Policy analysis, argues Fischer (1987), “lies squarely (if uncomfort-
ably) between science and ethics” (cited in Kenny and Giacomini,
2005, 257). It is at these coconstituting, sometimes uncomfort-
able intersections, that an IBPA is conducted: analyzing the social
constructions of policy problems and the empirical actualities of
inequity through a critical paradigm that remains committed to a
set of ethics of equity, social justice, and rigorous empirical inquiry.
These normative ethics—“what ought to be done in specific cir-
cumstances” (Kenny and Giacomini, 2005, 253)—demand that
policy actors foreground their commitments and values in order
to realize the transformative potential of an IBPA. Currently in
its nascent stages of application to this complex health field, more
work is needed to consider the extent to which the research par-
adigm of intersectionality, and an IBPA Framework specifically,
can be used effectively to address the specific health needs of het-
erogeneous groups who have disproportionally high rates of HIV
infection, including gay, bisexual, and other MSM. For example,
recent conference and meeting presentations in British Columbia

have begun a dialogue with civil society, researchers, and policy
actors about the limits and possibilities of intersectionality in the
field of gay men’s health (Hankivsky, 2010; Grace and Hankivsky,
2011). However, it is important to acknowledge that this paradigm
of analysis is but one way to understand the complex policy field
under investigation and should be complemented by other critical
social science literature including that which attends to the public
health implications of shifting sexual landscapes and “technolo-
gies of risk” for gay men (Race, 2001). For example, Kane Race’s
scholarship in this field is consistent with the focus within an IBPA
on questions of power, politics, and problem definition:
If, as Foucault argued, political technologies advance by reframing

what is essentially a political problem in the neutral language of
science (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 196), then we must attend
to the power effects of the seemingly neutral—but undeniably use-
ful—technologies of medicine, if we are to respond effectively to
HIV/AIDS. (2001, 168–169)
Calls have been made to recognize the value and urgency of

integrating intersectionality, along with other theories, such as the
minority stress model, life course perspective, and social ecology
perspective, into research and policy approaches that address the
needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)
communities (Institute of Medicine, 2011). While this attention
to questions of intersectionality and sexuality represents an excit-
ing development reflective of critical thinking within this field,
I caution that the operationalization of intersectionality by the
Institute of Medicine as a perspective that examines “an indi-
vidual’s multiple identities and the ways in which they interact”
risks obfuscating important discussions of power, history, and
social structure central to this mode of inquiry and recasting the
discussion of LGBTQ health as one of identity politics removed
from sustained considerations of structural disadvantage (Institute
of Medicine, 2011, 2). The mainstreaming of intersectionality in
policy and research discussions is exciting, but principles of equity,
power, social justice, and the multileveled nature of the issues
being addressed must not be lost along the way (Hankivsky et al.,
2012). As Dhamoon (2011) urges, “in the process of mainstream-
ing intersectionality, it is crucial to frame it as a form of social
critique so as to foreground its radical capacity to attend to and

disrupt oppressive vehicles of power” (230).
Rather than predetermine all of the social determinants of
HIV transmission, intersectionality demands that researchers
remain open to the process of discovery when considering com-
plex, intersecting, proximal, and distal factors. The same is true
for policy actors as they critically engage in the process of an IBPA
and work to consider equity-focused solutions to the problem of
HIV transmission. While much focus has been placed on the
public health implications of low viral load in a so-called post-
AIDS era (Dowsett and McInnes, 1996), this analysis signals the
need for further reflection on the implications of utilizing new
testing technologies that detect HIV infection when viral loads
are at their highest. The wide availability of new HIV testing
technologies that can detect AHI must be welcomed alongside
an increased focus on the structural drivers of the epidemic that
produce differential vulnerabilities depending on one’s inter-
sectional standpoint and a sustained consideration of the social
context in which technologies are being implemented including
the state’s legal climate. No evidence exists that the use of the
criminal law will prevent HIV transmission in Canada. Instead,
the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure poses a range of pub-
lic health challenges and may even serve as a deterrent to people
coming forward for HIV testing, including for new testing tech-
nologies capable of detecting AHI. Current efforts to support the
creation of prosecutorial guidelines as a harm reduction strategy
to limit the application of the criminal law in Ontario underscore
the need for such guidelines to be revised in British Columbia in
order to clarify disclosure obligations for people living with HIV
and mitigate the stigmatizing, dangerous, and overly broad use of
existing criminal law powers.
Notes
1. I am thankful for the feedback provided by Olena Hankivsky, Olivier
Ferlatte, and Ilan Meyer and acknowledge the resources provided
by Cecile Kazatchkine, Josephine MacIntosh, Glen Betteridge, and
Eric Mykhalovskiy. I am grateful for the comments of three anony-
mous peer reviewers on a previous iteration of their chapter and wish
to note the important contributions of many members of the CIHR
Team in the Study of Acute HIV infection in Gay Men.
2. While I use the category of MSM in the chapter due to its com-
mon application in the public health and epidemiological literature,
I position it as highly problematic (Young and Meyer, 2005). My
limited use of this behavioral category—used in HIV research since
at least the early 1990s—is to capture men who do not identify
as gay or bisexual (e.g., may identify as straight or heterosexual)
but who have sex with men. It is important to consider the related
conceptual challenge of nonidentity categories, such as MSM, and
what I call “identity-behavior” intersections, such as Black MSM.
Further, I argue that recent meta-analyses of HIV infection risk dis-
parities among Black MSM (relative to other MSM) in Canada, the
United States, and the United Kingdom (Millett et al., 2012) offer
much promise for understanding HIV transmission patterns but
would benefit from intersectional thinking in order to more robustly
account for the complex social and structural factors that produce
differential vulnerability.
3. The Oslo Declaration on HIV Criminalization, prepared by inter-
national civil society in Oslo, Norway, on February 13, 2012, has
compiled relevant international resources in this field as part of
their transnational advocacy, retrieved from http://www.hivjustice
.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Oslo_declaration.pdf. Also see
information on a recent Canadian documentary addressing the issue
of criminalization and HIV-positive women, retrieved from http://
www.positivewomenthemovie.org/.
4. This included lawyers, medical health professionals, medical and
mental health professionals, and AIDS Service Organization (ASO)
staff (n = 25) and people living with HIV/AIDS in Ontario (n = 28).
5. The website for the CIHR Team in the Study of Acute HIV Infection
in Gay Men, which includes published research and background
information on AHI, is http://www.acutehivstudy.com/.
6. Gilbert et al. (2011).
7. For more information on this campaign, including HIM’s key mes-
sages on AHI, visit http://checkhimout.ca/hottest/.
8. This research has also informed other public health outreach activi-
ties, including working with AIDS Vancouver Island (AVI) and HIM
in 2010 to conduct awareness campaigns in gay bars in Victoria,
British Columbia.
9. Betteridge (2009) explains that people may even have a duty, under
existing interpretations of Cuerrier, to disclose their possible HIV-
positive status if “the person knows there is a real possibility that
he or she has HIV, but has not received an actual HIV-positive test
result” (para. 4).
10. A recent article in the gay and lesbian newspaper Xtra! reviews why
key policy actors believe new HIV guidelines are needed for BC
prosecutors (Christopher, 2011). See Grace and McCaskell (in press)

for further information on HIV activism in this field.
11. For updated information on Canadian non-disclosure charges and
material on HIV/AIDS and the law, see www.aidslaw.ca.
12. Data provided by Betteridge and Mykhalovskiy (2011).
13. Supreme Court of Canada. Court File Nos. 33976/34094. Her
Majesty the Queen and Clato Lual Mabior, and Her Majesty the
Queen and DC.
14. For more information about this and other HIM campaigns, visit:
http://checkhimout.ca/. It is also worth noting that employees and
volunteers of HIM have been a part of discussions about intersec-
tionality (e.g., reading group meetings, special guest lectures) hosted
by the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy (IIRP) at
Simon Fraser University.
15. For more information on this campaign, visit: http://www.aidsac
tionnow.org/?p=349.
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8
C rossroa ds or C at eg or i es?
I n t e r sec t iona l i t y Th eory a n d
t h e C a se of L esbi a n, G ay,
a n d Bise x ua l E qua l i t i es
I n i t i at i v es i n U K L oc a l
G ov e r n m e n t
Surya Monro and Diane Richardson
It is not at all clear whether intersectionality should be limited to

understanding individual experiences, to theorizing identity, or
whether it should be taken as a property of social structures and
cultural discourses.
(Davis, 2008, 68).
The last 40 years have seen major transformations in the theori-

zation of sexuality, with wide-ranging implications for the fields
of social theory and policy. Intersectionality theory has emerged
during this period, as a means of addressing the complex ways in
which social characteristics are routed through each other. The
origins and development of intersectionality theory has been
well documented by authors such as Brah and Pheonix (2004),
Walby (2007), Nash (2008), Shields (2008), and Grabham et al.
(2009). Intersectionality theory contributes to our understand-
ings of sexuality in that it can be used to bridge two seemingly
disparate approaches to understanding of sexuality: those that
take a foundational approach, framing sexuality and gender—
or other forces, such as the material—as fundamental to the
190 Su r y a Mon r o a n d D i a n e R ic h a r ds on
ways in which individual and social identities are shaped, and

those that seek to deconstruct foundational categories (Davis,
2008). Intersectionality studies have focused primarily on gen-
der, class, and race; where included, sexuality is often placed in a
marginal position (see Crenshaw, 1997; Shields, 2008; Hurtado
and Sinha, 2008). There have been some exceptions, including
Beckett’s (2004) study of the operation of heterosexuality in the
lives of lesbian and disabled women, and Fish’s (2008) research
on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities and
health care. Many chapters in this edited collection, including
this chapter, contribute to the intersectional scholarship con-
cerning sexualities.
The concept of intersectionality has been the subject of con-
fusion (Davis, 2008), and there have been controversies around
whether intersectionality should be seen as a crossroads (Crenshaw,
1991), as axis of difference (Yuval-Davis, 2006), or as a dynamic
process (Staunaes 2003, cited in Davis, 2008, 68). There are
tensions within the field of intersectionality studies, relating to
broader debates within sexuality studies and feminisms, con-
cerning whether to pursue category-based analysis or to develop
analysis along a range of foundational axis (see Walby, 2007 and
Weldon, 2008). Concerns have also been raised that intersec-
tionality analysis has led to a problematic focus on the individ-
ual, identity, and representation (Conaghan, 2009). As Valentine
states, “the contemporary focus within the social sciences on the
fluidity of identity categories and the complexity of intersections
risks losing sight of the fact that within particular spaces there are
dominant spatial orderings that produce moments of exclusion for
particular groups” (2007, 19).
Following Crenshaw (1991), conventional approaches to inter-
sectionality focus on the place where more than one force of
inequality is operating. However, subsequent authors have devel-
oped other interpretations, for instance, McCall’s (2005) intracate-
gorical, anticategorical, and intercategorical forms of intersectional
analysis, and Walby’s (2007) separation of multiple inequalities into
different approaches, which tend to fall into either systems-oriented
approaches or postmodernist, deconstructive, and identity-focused
ones. This chapter was suggested by the work of these authors,
building in particular on McCall’s intercategorical approach, which
interrogates relations of inequality between whole groups, and
C r o s s r o a d s or C at e g or i e s? 191
manages the complexity of this by reducing analysis to one or two

intergroup relations at a time (McCall, 2005, 61).
This chapter discusses the conceptualization and application
of the term “intersectionality.” It explores questions concerning
the remit of intersectionality theory, specifically debates between
the conventional approaches that focus on the interstices, or cross-
roads, between different social forces and categories, and those
who argue instead for attention to specific social categories and
forces that may be seen as foundational. In order to explore this
debate, the chapter examines the operation of two structuring
forces within the context of LGB equalities initiatives in UK local
government: sexuality and spatiality. The category of sexuality is
shown to be important in shaping the lives of LGB people and the
work of the local authorities that interface with them. The cate-
gory of the spatial was selected because empirical findings indicate
that the spatial dimension is key to the structuring of sexualities
at a local level; the level at which local authorities interface with
the population. The chapter draws on scholarship in the field of
geographies of sexuality1, the trajectory of which is well rehearsed
by authors such as Collins (2004), and Brown, Browne, and Lim
(2007). The focus of the chapter is narrowed in that it looks at
LGB equalities, and transgender (T) is not included 2; transgen-
der is discussed elsewhere (see for example Monro, 2005; Hines,
2007; and Monro and Richardson, 2010).
The chapter begins by providing an overview of the literature
and the contemporary situation regarding local government sexu-
alities equalities initiatives, noting the major recent policy changes,
and then summarizing the types of work that are taking place and
the ways in which local authorities do—or do not—deal with inter-
sectionality. In doing so it develops understanding of sexuality as
a foundational category, and addresses the intersectional nature of
sexuality, within the context of UK local government. The chapter
then brings in a second category via an exploration of spatiality,
focusing on the lives of the LGB people whom local authorities
represent and the spatialized interventions that local authority
actors develop concerning LGB equalities. We conclude by arguing
for an intersectionality studies that interrogates social categories as
well as their interstices, as illustrated by our use of data regarding
LGB equalities work in local government, where spatiality forms
one aspect of the complex and situated structuring of sexualities.
The empirical content of the chapter is based on anonymized

findings from a large Economic and Social Research Council
funded study of local authorities in Northern Ireland, Wales,
and Northern and Southern England.3 We utilized a participa-
tive action research approach (McNiff, 1998), specifically Action
Learning Sets, which met 4 times in each region (a total of 16
meetings, with members representing different local authorities,
community organizations, and partner agencies from across the
regions). We also tracked the development and implementation
of sexualities equalities policies in four local authorities that were
purposively sampled to represent authorities of different types, lev-
els of performance, political colors, activity concerning equalities,
and levels of deprivation. We did fieldwork with strategic level and
frontline local authority workers (focusing on two different service
areas for each authority), and their partners in statutory sector and
voluntary/community sector agencies (a total of 37 interviews).
A further strand of the methodology consisted of interviews with
key national stakeholders across the 3 countries (15 interviews),
and a final strand comprised of 5 interviews with local authority
members (councillors). This chapter is based on data from North
East England and Wales, including 2 Action Learning Sets, 18
interviews in case study localities, and interviews with 10 national
stakeholder representatives.4 The data is used primarily as evidence
for the argument that category-based, as well as interstice-based,
approaches to intersectional analysis are necessary.5
LGB E qualities Initiatives in

Local Government
There is a small but growing body of work concerning sexuality
and equality and diversity initiatives in local government. A num-
ber of writers, including Carabine (1995, 1996a, 1996b), Cooper
(1994, 1997), and Tobin (1990), focus on developments in the
1980s and early 1990s. This era saw the development of lesbian
and gay equalities work amongst some left-wing local authorities,
and a subsequent right-wing backlash that led to the introduc-
tion of Section 28,6 and the collapse of most sexuality equalities
initiatives. The next phase of sexuality equalities work, which was
brought in by a politically more heterogeneous tranche of local
authorities in the 1990s, was quite different in many ways, with
a shift taking place toward programs addressing homophobic vio-

lence, and a decline in overtly political affirmations of gay identity,
as well as some areas of work such as AIDS initiatives (Cooper
and Monro, 2003; Carabine and Monro, 2004; Monro, 2006,
2007). The most recent body of work is just emerging (Monro and
Richardson, 2010; and Richardson and Monro, 2012).
Fieldwork was conducted at a time when the field of UK LGB
equalities work was undergoing a period of rapid change, fueled
by the introduction of a range of new legislation, including the
Adoption and Children Act 2002, the Civil Partnerships Act
2004, and the Equality Regulations (Sexual Orientation) 2007.7
A tranche of policy directives and implementation mechanisms
were being developed in tandem with statutory drivers. LGB
equalities initiatives were further affected by the recently intro-
duced Commission for Equality and Human Rights, as well as the
Single Equality Act (2010).8
Overall, the research findings indicated that LGB equalities
work has become a normalized aspect of the local authority service
provision remit to a degree, alongside other strands of equalities
(race, gender, disability, age, faith, and Welsh language in Wales),
partially as a result of the legislative drivers. However, although
LGB equalities work is established in some authorities, provision is
patchy, and sexualities equalities initiatives remain marginalized in
relation to other equalities strands. The larger metropolitan, uni-
tary, and borough councils are generally more active concerning
LGB equalities work, but some of the rural councils are proactive
in this field.
The research findings showed that there are debates amongst
local authority actors about the extent to which LGB service users
have sexualities-specific interests or needs, as opposed to interests/
needs that are shared with the rest of the population. This issue
is of importance to discussions about intersectionality, in explora-
tions of the extent to which sexuality is examined as a category
within the local authority context. Areas of local authority provi-
sion that are of key importance to LGB people revolve around
hate crime and bullying, especially homophobic and biphobic bul-
lying of children and staff in schools. Health and social care are
areas of concern, including, for example, awareness of the needs
of older people in same-sex relationships. Housing is another
key area, including same-sex partner provision, and provision for
people made homeless due to homophobic abuse. Culture and lei-

sure are also of importance, including the licensing of lesbian and
gay venues, support for Pride and Mardi Gras events, and library
provision. In the UK, a small number of workers are specifically
employed by local authorities to ensure that legislative equality
duties are adhered to by their organizations, and that diversity in
the local communities is supported, and workers in specific service
areas also tasked with some equalities work.
An intersectional analysis of sexualities equalities initiatives in
local government will be concerned with the discursive and cul-
tural construction of LGB issues in local government. Within local
authorities and their statutory partners, sexualities equalities work
is associated with the private sphere, and with a lack of visibility as
compared to strands associated with people who may have more
physically evident characteristics. The research findings indicate
that sexualities equalities work is particularly subject to affective
issues such as nervousness and embarrassment, as well as norma-
tive judgments around notions of choice, legitimacy, and worthi-
ness, so that, for instance, disability related issues are likely to be
seen as more worthy of support than sexualities equalities issues.
The supposedly private nature of sexuality issues has a number
of impacts in the local authority context, including ongoing dif-
ficulties with carrying out monitoring concerning employee and
service user sexual orientation.
Although the research demonstrated that there are specific
attributes associated with local authority LGB equality initiatives,
it also revealed the wide variation across local authorities regard-
ing the discursive formation of sexualities equalities work, as well
as the ways in which such formations played out in terms of policy
and practice. Local authorities differed considerably in terms of
institutional norms concerning sexualities equalities; embedded
pro-equalities cultures were present in some, whereas others had
cultures of homophobic banter and active resistance to sexualities
equalities work. Overt homophobia was evidenced in some cases, for
instance, a female equalities worker in a Welsh authority described
how “I have had red lines through reports, where I’ve used the
terminology ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual’”; she was told to replace this
with the term “different communities.” Homophobia impacted
directly in service provision in certain ways, for instance, many
local authorities place firewalls on their computers, preventing
members of the public (and in some cases, workers) from accessing

information regarding LGB services and support groups. Issues
were particularly apparent in schools:
A lot of the schools are still extremely twitchy when it comes

to homophobic abuse within schools, both the learners being
homophobically abused and equally staff, and then you’ve almost
got that sort of black hole of “Well, if we admit we’ve got a prob-
lem, we’ve got to deal with it, that would knock our ratings, how
do we deal with it?, what can we do to deal with it?, and how far
can we go down the line to educate people?,” and it’s that sort
of almost “Let’s put it on the too difficult pile.” (Police Officer,
Southern England)
The particular positioning of local authorities, as accountable

to their local electorate, interfaces with LGB concerns in a dis-
tinct way as compared to other statutory bodies. Councillors are
highly sensitive to pressure from their local communities, who
can be actively homophobic and who can exercise homophobic as
well as pro-equality views via the mechanisms of local democracy.
A substantial number of research participants across the UK
referred to the potentially negative impact of councillors who are
predominantly from majority communities (white, male, hetero-
sexual); these may be unsympathetic to minority community issues.
There was evidence of councillors being deliberately obstructive,
unwittingly homophobic or heterosexist, or simply ignorant or
disengaged, for instance:
We’ve got a real problem, I think, with our councillor’s lack of

knowledge about equality issues across the board. We’ve tried to
engage them several times, we’ve got [Councillor] equality cham-
pions for every single strand, yet some of them don’t even know
which strand they’re meant to be championing. (Welsh Action
Learning Set member)
The importance of party political support for the equalities agenda

was evident in the earlier research (Monro, 2006), but there have
been some changes in England and Wales, specifically around the
shift toward greater cross-party support for the equalities agenda,
as well as the impact of the legislation and the related normaliza-
tion of LGBT equalities work.
To summarize, the field of local authority sexualities equalities

work has emerged alongside, although often marginal to, other
areas of equalities work such as race and disability. Whilst it has
become normalized to a degree, it is patchy across different author-
ities, with evidence of homophobic cultures within some local
authorities, as well as proactive LGB equalities work. Sexuality
can be considered to be an important structuring force within the
context of local government service provision, because the LGB
population that local authorities serve have some sexuality-specific
interests and needs; sexuality equalities is constructed as having
particular affective and political sensitivities; and homophobia may
be institutionalized in some local authorities in ways that other
forms of prejudice are not.
Intersectionality at the Local

Authority Level
In the 1980s, a small number of local authorities began doing les-
bian and gay equalities work, taking what could be seen as an inter-
sectional approach to equalities (Cooper, 1994), although there
were significant omissions regarding bisexuality. Historically, the
term “intersectionality” was not generally used by local authori-
ties, and this absence has continued. The notion of intersectional-
ity does, however, have currency amongst national players, one of
whom said that
I don’t think they [the local authorities] have reached the stage
where they are talking about intersectionality much, and I think
the strands-specific approach is pretty, still pretty strong—or they
jump right up to generic—local authorities that have been doing
work in this area for a long time are maybe doing well, but there
is little discussion of the particular issues faced by, for example,
someone who is gay and Sikh. We use the term multiple disadvan-
tage, not intersectionality. (National stakeholder)
Despite the absence of intersectionality rhetoric in local govern-

ment, the research findings evidenced a substantial shift toward
an intersectional approach to equalities work, with the develop-
ment of integrated frameworks for conducting work on the dif-
ferent equalities strands in tandem having been introduced over
the last few years9, as well as the establishment of the Commission
for Equalities and Human Rights, which takes an intersectional

approach at a national level. These integrated frameworks, which
deal with the different equalities strands in conjunction, are being
used to manage equalities work more strategically, as well as to
make it more politically palatable. For instance:
The more innovative public sector organisations have worked out

that it is easier to take a multi-strand to equality than a single-
strand approach—it is quicker and politically it plays well, it allows
people to be more imaginative in thinking about the links—for
example local Pride festivals which incorporate family friendly ini-
tiatives.” (National stakeholder)
The implementation of intersectional approaches to sexualities

equalities work in local government is achieved via impact assess-
ments, as well as briefings to service directorates and professional
trainings associated with specific service areas (such as social work).
Impact assessments involve examining service plans and policies to
ensure that the needs and interests of marginalized social groups
are taken into account. Frontline staff work to the service plans
and policies, routinely taking approaches that can be seen as inter-
sectional; in other words, they attempt to be aware of the different
facets of identity that service users have. The research provided evi-
dence that intersectional approaches to training are being taken,
for example, one local authority worker in Wales described the way
in which she carries out a generic equalities training with staff in
which there is discussion about the social construction of identity,
with attention being paid to sexual diversity, and that “we try and
get people to understand that we don’t just have one label, we are
a cocktail of many different things.”
The development of integrated approaches to service provision
is not a panacea in which LGB people will have their interests
respected and recognized alongside those of a host of other service
users. There are indications from the research findings that inte-
grated approaches may lose some of the more marginalized inter-
ests. The focus of service provision is necessarily on those perceived
to be in most need, and whilst this will include some sections of
the LGB population, it does not always address the interests of
others. The following quote illustrates the ways that intersections
between aging, ability, ill health, and sexuality are dealt with by
local authority actors, as well as the way in which such approaches
can inadvertently construct notions of a universal, possibly hetero-

sexual, citizen, masking the specificities of LGB identities:
We don’t provide services because people are lesbian or gay or

bisexual because there is a criteria under the government’s social
care or community care designations, what we do is we provide all
services . . . all of it is open to people who meet the criteria, if they
are LGB and elderly and frail, or if they’re LGB and disabled, if
they are LGB and learning difficulties then they will get those
services. (Local authority worker, North East)
Alternative approaches to service provision combine targeted

and integrated approaches, for instance, a local authority worker
described the way in which a young person who has been made
homeless because they came out to their parents might not then feel
comfortable talking to an apparently heterosexual housing worker
about being gay, necessitating some LGB-specific provision.
The development of integrated equalities work in local authori-
ties is related to the debates in intersectionality studies about
category-based versus interstice-related approaches, demonstrat-
ing the way in which local authorities are attempting to deal with
multiple social characteristics, as well as potential difficulties with
intersectional approaches. Developments concerning the equalities
strands also foreground the difficulties associated with applying
intersectionality to group levels, both in conceptual terms and in
service planning and delivery terms. Analysis of the interstices is
relatively easy at the level of individual service user, but harder at
the group level, where people have diverse intersectional identi-
ties. Grouping people risks erasing difference, but is nevertheless
necessary if policies are to be formulated and implemented. The
concerns outlined in the literature, about the potentially individu-
alizing nature of intersectionality theory (Grabham et al. 2009),
are arguably justified unless group, category-based approaches are
also taken; partially foundational approaches are the only way in
which analysis at the institutional level can be achieved.
Sexuality in Intersection with the Spatial

The experiences of LGB people living in particular localities
are key to understanding local government initiatives, given the
commitment to community engagement that is part of local
government modernization, following the Local Government Act

(2000). The role of space in structuring LGB people’s lives, and
thus in shaping the policies and practices of the local authorities
that service them, was strongly evident in our research. The find-
ings substantiated the assertion that “sexuality—its regulation,
norms, institutions, pleasures and desires—cannot be understood
without understanding the spaces through which it is constituted,
practised, and lived” (Brown, Browne, and Lim, 2007, 4). The
importance of space is reflected in the literature, with respect to,
for instance, working-class lesbians and spatiality; Taylor (2007),
for example, found that a combination of low-income and spatial
barriers formed major impediments to some working-class lesbi-
ans accessing lesbian-friendly spaces in the UK. This part of the
chapter addresses two interrelated aspects of spatiality in relation
to LGB equalities initiatives: prejudice and geography.
As we have noted above, the chapter refers to developments in
geographies of sexuality, including research concerning rural and
small town sexualities (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Little, 2003).
As well, the chapter speaks to the “undesirable others” discussed
by Casey (2007) in his examination of an urban commercial gay
scene; Casey found that processes of exclusion of lesbians and gay
men who are older, disabled, female, poor, or supposedly unat-
tractive operate to construct the boundaries of urban gay spaces.
Local authorities, in their focus on service provision, include such
“unwanted” people squarely within their remit, whilst also having
responsibility for planning and licensing for the commercial gay
areas within their localities.
Our research reflected the literature on spatiality and LGB peo-
ple, indicating that visible LGB communities tended to be con-
centrated in urban areas. Some cities were seen as more hospitable
to LGB people than others, with developed gay scenes, and LGB
people traveled to get to these areas. Equalities initiatives such as
youth service provision for LGB people and health drop-in centers
were also largely located in the larger towns and cities, although
there were some exceptions, such as a LGB youth group based
in a small town in Wales. We found that prejudice against LGB
people appeared to be heightened in rural or small town localities,
with a number of both Welsh and English contributors making
comparisons between these localities and large cities, where there
is more diversity generally; this finding reflects the work of queer
geographers such as Bell and Valentine (1995) and Binnie (2004).

A number of contributors to the research discussed the way in
which the geographical dispersal of people, into small, close-knit
communities, entails a lack of understanding of diversity. This lack
of understanding of sexual diversity structured the work of local
authority actors, for example:
I think it is this fear of, fear of not getting it right, ’cause people
do want to do a good job here, that’s something that I think is
fantastic about [locality] really, em, how dedicated people are in
difficult situations really, but people do want to do a good job
but I think they’re worried if they don’t know enough, the com-
munity isn’t very, there seems to be no infrastructure and it seems
to be very hidden, you know, and if those gay members of staff
that are working in departments like Children and Young People
are afraid of the stigmatisation of being predatory, not appropriate
to work with children, all these other stereotypes that are bound,
that haven’t gone away in Wales, that perhaps if you were working
in Manchester, Brighton or elsewhere, you’d know that wasn’t sen-
sible way of thinking, those stereotypes would have already been
challenged, you know, you’d know that was an antiquated way of
thinking, or completely wrong but here, there’s no, there’s only
me I think sometimes who goes around challenging that, em, you
know. (Welsh local authority worker)
The Welsh case study and Action Learning Set indicated that
the geographical dispersal of the Welsh population and attendant
difficulties with communication and travel emerged as a major—in
some instances a predominant—factor in the way that LGB peo-
ple’s lives are structured and the local authority work that may (or
may not) be taking place concerning LGB equalities within Wales.
A number of Welsh contributors from the case study (both workers
and community members) talked about the difficulties that LGB
people have accessing LGB social spaces, due to geographical barri-
ers. The spatial characteristics of the country also pose a barrier to
community organization, with the lesbian Welsh LGB community
organization representative discussing the obstacles to conduct-
ing community consultations in mid Wales: “it is very difficult
because mid Wales is very spread out, and has a lot of mountains in
between major towns.” These geographical barriers structure local
authority equalities work, including community engagement and
community-building, which involve people taking part in consul-

tations, workshops, and other events. The barriers even affected
our capacity to conduct the Action Learning Sets, which provided
space for local authority workers and other stakeholders (including
LGB community representatives) to develop strategies for address-
ing LGB equalities in the statutory sector; we had to postpone
Action Learning Set sessions twice due to transport difficulties
associated with flooding in rural Wales.
The way in which social forces are routed through each other to
forge marginalized subject positions was apparent when examin-
ing findings concerning LGB people in Wales. In other words, it is
not just barriers concerning space that affect LGB people, it is the
effects of space, poverty, and other factors, taken together. Many
of the contributors to the research discussed the ways in which
Welsh LGB people are socially excluded when they live in rural
areas and are young, older, economically deprived, cannot drive or
do not have access to private transport, or access to the Internet, or
are ill or disabled. These issues are dealt with in different ways by
local authority actors and local authority strategies. In some cases,
exclusion remains hidden and unaddressed. For instance, a lesbian
employee who was a youth worker for a local authority described
the way in which a rural young man came out to his parents, who
stopped him going to the gay venue in his local town, so that “his
support network was cut off completely, then he will end up with
mental health issues . . . everybody knew about it but nobody could
do anything about it.” However, issues such as LGB people’s access
to public transport, and the need for isolated young LGB people to
connect with other young LGB people, were recognized by some
of the local authority contributors to the research. There were also
a number of examples of local authority actors acting proactively
to address marginalizing intersections, as evidenced in the follow-
ing interview snippet, provided by a Welsh housing worker:
Contributor: “We were looking at housing somebody that was HIV

positive, and it was like, ‘I don’t house people with that.’”
Interviewer: “Who said that?”
Contributor: “Pardon?”
Interviewer: “Who said ‘I don’t house people with that?’
Contributor: “A colleague, like kicked off.”
Interviewer: “Right, OK. So did this person refuse to deal with
them?”
Contributor: “No, it’s been dealt with now.”

Interviewer: “What happened to make that? I mean, did they kick
off and then you had to talk them around or did you have to
wave policy documents at them or?”
Contributor: [inaudible] [nervously laughs]
Interviewer: “So what actually happened then? When this person
kicked off, what happened?”
Contributor: “Em, we were looking at allocating a flat, and the
person had a hundred medical points for being, he’s got full
blown AIDS, and I just overheard a conversation that was going
on, and it was like, ‘oh,’ I interrupted and said, ‘why haven’t
you . . . isn’t so and so on the list?,’ ‘yeah, we’ve overlooked him’
‘why?,’ ‘I don’t want to house anybody with that,’ ‘well, you
can’t do that, you cannot do that.”
Overall, our findings demonstrated the importance of the spatial

in shaping the cultures of the communities that local authorities
represent. Geographical factors played a key role in shaping the
lives of LGB people, including the sorts of prejudice they might
face, and spatially structured intersectional marginalization was
noticeable with respect to the LGB population. The intersec-
tion between sexuality and spatiality was dealt with in different
ways by local authorities; marginalized identities remained hid-
den in some cases, whilst in others a pro-equalities agenda was
implemented.
C onclusion
This chapter has sought to clarify the remit of intersectionality
studies, in particular the debate concerning whether intersection-
ality studies should focus on the interstices between social catego-
ries, or rather focus on interrogating particular social categories.
It has done this by demonstrating that attention to the category
of space is important in understanding the structuring of sexuali-
ties, within the context of UK local authority sexualities equalities
work.
The chapter sites its examination of the debate concerning
intersections and categories partially at the institutional level, via
its exploration of local authority equalities initiatives. Whilst the
notion of intersectionality is absent from local authority discourse,
strategies have been developed within the realm of sexualities
equalities policy making and practice in order to deal with the ten-
sions between category-specific and interstice-oriented approaches
to equalities. The strategies that are employed include equality pol-
icies that address different equality strands in tandem, recognizing
what is often termed “multiple disadvantage,” the use of impact
assessments that assess intersectional disadvantages amongst ser-
vice users, and trainings that encourage service providers to ana-
lyze identity complexity. These strategies enable large institutions
to address complexity at the group level, rather than at the level of
the individual subject sited at the intersection of particular social
forces. However, it seems that local authorities tend to focus on
individual equality strands, and that addressing multiple or inter-
secting strands takes work to a level of complexity that can be
challenging, especially given the resource constraints that authori-
ties face. This tendency illustrates the difficulties associated with
intersectionality in the arena of local government policy making
and practice. Analysis of the interstices between social character-
istics is relatively straightforward at the level of the individual, but
once group-level conceptualization is undertaken a category-based
approach is required to a degree.
The importance of specific categories in structuring social life
does not render a focus on the interstices between them (a focus
that has more usually been associated with intersectionality theory)
defunct. As Weldon (2008) states, it is possible to think of social
characteristics10 as having some independent effects and some
intersectional effects. In this chapter we argue for an approach that
combines interstice-based analysis with an examination of particu-
lar social categories, in this case sexuality and the spatial. Attention
to specific categories, which can in some cases be seen as founda-
tional, is important both as a means of achieving depth of analysis
and as a way of developing intersectionality theory into something
that can be applied at the institutional level. Attention to the inter-
stices is also crucial, because it enables sensitivity to other social
characteristics, such as the material, ability, faith, and age. In this
chapter, the marginalizing effects of poverty, youth, and illness
were pronounced when viewed in intersection with LGB identities
and spatial barriers. The chapter concludes that a focus purely on
foundational analysis, without concurrent sensitivity to the ways in
which social forces are routed through each other, is insufficient in
understanding the social construction of sexuality.
Notes
1. As well as other fields.
2. Except of course where trans people are also LGB.
3. ESRC grant no. RES-062–23–0577 “Organisational Change,
Resistance and Democracy: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
Equalities Initiatives in Local Government.” We would like to thank
the two research associates who worked on the project: Dr Michaela
Fay, who conducted the research in the North East, and Dr. Ann
McNulty, who undertook the research in the South of England and
Northern Ireland as well as data analysis and writing. We wish to
extend thanks to the contributors and our advisory group members
for their input to the project.
4. The data that was available at the time of writing.
5. Some of the material was published previously in Sociology 44(5).
6. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1998, since repealed),
determined that local authorities could not intentionally promote,
via published material or teaching, same-sex relationships or homo-
sexuality as a “pretended family relationship.”
7. The Adoption and Children Act (2002) allows unmarried couples
(including same-sex couples) to apply for joint adoption of children.
The Gender Recognition Act (2004) provides improved levels of
legal recognition for transsexual people. The Civil Partnerships Act
(2004) provides a number of rights for registered same-sex couples.
The Equality Regulations (Sexual Orientation) 2007 bans employ-
ment discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation (see www
.stonewall.org.uk, www.pfc.org.uk, both accessed on August 18,
2009).
8. The Equality Act was passed in April 2010.
9. These are the Equality Standard in England, which has been
replaced by the Equality Framework for Local Government (I&DeA,
2009) and the Equalities Improvement Framework for Wales, see
http://www.wlga.gov.uk/english/equality-improvement-frame
work-for-wales/ (accessed on October 08, 2009).
10. Weldon focuses on gender, race, and class.
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C on t r i bu t or s
Anıl Al-Rebholz is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at

Cornelia Gothe Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe
University, Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Her latest work, pub-
lished in German, considers the transformation of oppositional
politics and discursive practices in Turkey in the last three decades.
Her research stems from interviews conducted with the protago-
nists of Turkish feminist movement, Kurdish women’s movement,
and liberal and human rights movement. Currently, her research
areas include transnationalization, migration, gender as well as
political sociology, and knowledge production processes.
Ryan Combs is a qualitative researcher at the University of
Manchester’s Institute of Population Health. His work focuses on
health inequalities, marginalized populations, and public policy.
Dr. Combs is currently writing a book about transgender health
policy in the UK, which will be published by Manchester University
Press.
Daniel Grace is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University
of British Columbia, Faculty of Medicine, as part of a Canadian
Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) funded multidisciplinary
investigation exploring the use of new HIV testing technologies for
early detection and response among gay men in British Columbia,
Canada. Daniel has a PhD in sociology from the University of
Victoria, British Columbia (2012); is a research associate at the
Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser
University; and a visiting fellow at the London School of Hygiene &
Tropical Medicine (2013). His ongoing research interests include
global health, HIV/AIDS, transnational legislative reform pro-
cesses, and social inequality.
Kate Livingston is a doctoral student in the Department of
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State
210 C on t r i bu t or s
University in Columbus. Her research considers how public dis-

courses about women’s sexual, reproductive, and maternal lives
shape adoption law, policy, and practice in the United States. Her
current projects focus on the impact of abortion politics on US
adoption policy.
Penny Miles conducts research on social care for older LGB (les-
bian, gay, and bisexual) people in Wales at Swansea University,
and research on sexual diversity and human rights at Universidad
Diego Portales, Chile. In 2010, she was awarded the Harold
Blakemore prize by the Society for Latin American Studies. Her
principal research interests include human rights, LGBTI rights,
Latin America, and socio-legal research methods.
Surya Monro is a reader in sociology and social policy at the
University of Huddersfield. Her research interests are in the
LGBTQI field, specifically in debates concerning citizenship and
democracy, intersectionality, and social movements. Surya has
published substantially in the fields of gender and sexuality, nota-
bly gender politics: citizenship, activism, and sexual diversity and
(with Diane Richardson) Sexuality, Equality and Diversity. Her
forthcoming book Bisexual Identities will be published in 2014 by
Palgrave Macmillan.
Diane Richardson is professor of sociology at Newcastle
University. She has written extensively about gender and sexuality.
Her most recent books are Contesting Recognition, coedited with
Janice McLaughlin and Peter Phillimore; Sexuality, Equality and
Diversity, coauthored with Surya Monro; and Intersections between
Feminist and Queer Theory, coedited with Janice McLaughlin and
Mark Casey
Erica E. Townsend-Bell is an assistant professor of political sci-
ence at Oklahoma State University. Her academic interests are com-
parative racial and gender politics, Latin American politics, and
social movements. Her publication “What is Relevance: Defining
Intersectional Praxis in Uruguay,” Political Research Quarterly
64(1): 187–199 (2011), is a one part of a larger book manuscript
that she is currently completing, titled Incorporating Difference:
Implementing Intersectionality in Latin America. Her work is also
published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and
forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics.
C on t r i bu t or s 211
Wendy G. Smooth is associate professor of women’s gender and

sexuality studies and faculty affiliate with the Kirwan Institute for
the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. Her
forthcoming book, Perceptions of Power and Influence: Race and
Gender in American State Legislatures examines African American
women legislators’ experiences serving in race and gendered institu-
tions. Smooth has published in journals such as Gender and Politics
and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy ; as well as numerous
book chapters focused on women of color in US politics.
I n de x
Aguinaldo, Jeffrey 172, 176, 182 Casey, Mark 163, 187, 199, 205,
Al-Rebholz, Anıl 7, 12, 125, 126, 206, 210
127, 209 Cohen, Cathy 22, 38, 151, 153,
Anderson, Roy 157, 164, 185 183, 185
Anthias, Floya ii, 17, 38, 107, 127 Cohen, Deborah 137, 138, 153
Arat, Yesim 108, 113, 127 Colapinto, John 137, 138, 153
Collins, Patricia Hill i, 5, 9, 23,
Bazar, Emily 93, 98, 103, 104 38, 162, 183
Bell, David 199, 200, 204 Combahee River Collective i,
Benjamin, Harry 134, 135, 136, 19, 39
137, 141, 151, 152 Combs, Ryan 7, 31, 209
Berger, Michelle Tracey 13, 37, Conaghan, Joanne 25, 39, 190,
38, 40, 61, 172, 182 205
Bergquist, Kathleen Ja Sook 95, Connell, Raewyn 73, 74, 77,
96, 104 84, 86
Betteridge, Glen 158, 161, 168, Cooper, Davina 9, 39, 111, 192,
169, 170, 171, 180, 181, 182, 193, 196, 205, 206
186 Crenshaw, Kimberle i, ix, 1, 2, 9,
Block, Melissa 98, 103, 104 13, 17, 18, 19, 29, 33, 37, 39,
Bornstein, Kate 69, 86, 147, 148, 43, 161, 183, 190, 205
149, 152 Currah, Paisley 65, 76, 84, 86,
Brah, Avtar i, ii, 189, 205 153
Brenner, Bluma 157, 164, 182
Brown, Gavin 191, 199, 205 Davis, Angela 7, 117, 169, 183
Browne, Kath 191, 199, 205 Davis, Kathy 7, 16, 30, 39, 43,
Bullough, Vern 134, 137, 152 60, 127, 128, 189, 190, 205
Burris, Scott 158, 172, 176, 182, Denny, Dallas 135, 136, 137, 153
185 Dhamoon, Rita 44, 60, 160, 179,
Butler, Judith 101, 104, 138, 139, 183
140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 152 Diamond, Milton 137, 139, 153
Carabine, Jean 192, 193, 205 Elliot, Richard 158, 182, 184, 185
Carp, E. Wayne 96, 97, 104 Ertürk, Yakin 112, 114, 126, 128
214 I n de x
Fausto-Sterling, Anne 138, 148, Kayhan, Fatma 114, 117, 118,

149, 153 129
Ferlatte, Olivier 172, 180, 184, Keck, Margaret E. 111, 116,
185 126, 129
Foucault, Michel 139, 144, 146, Kessler, Suzanne 132, 142, 154
153, 179 Kinsey, Alfred 134, 135, 140,
Fraser, Christophe 157, 164, 185 141, 152, 154
Knapp, Gudrun-Axeli 16, 40,
Gabe, Jonathan 158, 160, 187 44, 60
Gilbert, Mark 157, 167, 181, Kock, Wendy 93, 98, 103, 104
184
Goffman, Erving 67, 86, 141, Lacey, Marc 92, 93, 100, 105
142, 153 Larcher, Akim 169, 177, 185
Gordan, Linda 16, 39, 96, 97, 104 Lim, Jason 191, 199, 205
Grabham, Emily 3, 9, 39, 44, 60, Lombardo, Emanuela 34, 36, 38,
189, 198, 205, 206 40, 44, 60, 61
Grace, Daniel 8, 158, 161, 162, Lorber, Judith 143, 147, 154
167, 168, 169, 170, 175, 177, Luft, Rachel E. 43, 44, 61
179, 182, 184
Greenberg, Julie A. 70, 76, 86 MacIntosh, Josephine 161,
Grewal, Inderpal 110, 111, 125, 167, 168, 170, 175, 180,
128 184, 185
Manuel, Tiffany 44, 58, 61
Hancock, Ange-Marie 2–5, 9, 20, McCall, Leslie i, 12, 37, 40, 161,
24, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39 186, 190, 191, 206
Hankivsky, Olena 159, 160, 161, McCann, M. W. 65, 75, 80, 87
162, 179, 180, 183, 185 Mckenna, Wendy 132, 142, 154
Hayes, Richard 157, 164, 185 Meyer, Ilan 163, 180, 181, 186,
Hines, Sally 133, 142, 146, 147, 187
154, 163, 187, 191, 206 Meyerowitz, Joanne 133, 134,
Hird, Myra 133, 147, 154 141, 154
Hirschfeld, Magnus 133, 134, Michello, Janet 147, 151, 155
151, 154 Miles, Penny 6, 20, 31, 67, 68,
Hollingsworth, T. Déirdre 157, 70, 80, 87, 210
164, 185 Minter, Shannon Price 65, 76,
82, 86, 153
Jordan-Zachery, Julia 23, 37, 39 Money, John 137, 138, 139, 140,
Juang, Richard M. 65, 76, 85, 141, 152, 154
86, 153 Monro, Surya 8, 31, 191, 193,
195, 205, 206, 210
Kantola, Johanna 3, 4, 9, 44, Mykhalovskiy, Eric 158, 160,
58, 60 161, 168, 169, 170, 176, 180,
Kaplan, Caren 107, 125, 128, 129 182, 186
I n de x 215
Namaste, Viviane 145, 151, 152, Subedi, Sree 147, 151, 155
154 Symington, Alison 168, 169, 177,
Nash, Jennifer 37, 40, 44, 61, 185, 187
189, 206
Nousiainen, Kevät 3, 4, 9, 44, Tausig, Mark 147, 151, 155
58, 60 Taylor, Yvette 163, 187, 199, 206
Tekeli, Sirin 112, 113, 129
Pao, David 157, 164, 186 Timmermans, Stefan 158, 160,
Parr, Adrian 99, 100, 101, 106 187
Pattynama, Pamela 2, 9, 22, 40 Townsend-Bell, Erica 6, 8, 34,
Phoenix, Ann i, 2, 9, 22, 40, 205 35, 47, 61, 210
Ravecca, Paulo 52, 53, 61 Valentine, Gill 3, 9, 27, 41, 190,

Richardson, Diane 8, 31, 191, 199, 200, 204, 207
193, 205, 206, 210 Verloo, Micke 2, 4, 10, 34, 35,
Roen, Katrina 64, 69, 87 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 60, 61
Sharpe, Alex 64, 70, 85, 87 Walby, Slyvia 189, 190, 207
Shields, Stephanie A. 16, 32, 40, Weber, Lynn 90, 106, 161, 187
189, 190, 206 Weldon, Laurel. S. 2, 10, 24, 25,
Siegel, Robert 98, 103, 104 31, 41, 44, 61, 190, 203, 204,
Sikkink, Kathyrin 111, 116, 207
126, 129 Whittle, Stephen 133, 135, 146,
Simien, Eveyln 19, 31, 40 152, 154, 155
Smooth, Wendy 3, 5, 8, 15, 31, Wilson, Angelia xi, xii, 36, 205
37, 40, 90, 131, 211 Wright, Melissa 91, 99, 106
Squires, Judith 33, 34, 35, 41,
44, 58, 61 Yuval-Davis, Nira ii, 3, 7, 10, 15,
Strolovich, Dara 22, 34, 35, 41 17, 23, 25, 34, 36, 38, 41, 107,
Stryker, Susan 133, 134, 135, 108, 109, 123, 124, 125, 127,
147, 152, 154 129, 190, 207

(The Politics of Intersectionality) Angelia R. Wilson (Eds.) - Situating Intersectionality - Politics, Policy, and Power-Palgrave Macmillan US (2013)

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What is intersectionality theory?

What is intersectionality theory?

What are some of the criticisms of intersectionality theory?

What are some of the criticisms of intersectionality theory?

The Politics of Intersectionality

The Politics of Intersectionality series builds on the long-standing

Also in the series:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the

Series Introduction: The Politics of Intersectionality xi

7 Intersectional Analysis at the Medico-Legal Borderland:

Notes on Contributors 209

Currently intersectionality scholarship lacks a meaningful clear-

considerations among policy practitioners and scholars with ques-

This collection emerged from an international conference,

Situating Intersectionality brings together academics working in

notes how cultural constructions can disempower and reproduce,

focuses on the interaction of different structures of inequality

and the possibility, or not, for political solidarity? Psychologist

of how intersectionality operates, a theory of the power dynamics

Whether or not one adopts this particular political agenda, it

Throughout this collection, authors draw upon an intersec-

In chapter 5, Anil Al-Rebholz raises questions about the role of

In chapter 7, Daniel Grace employs Intersectionality-Based

strategizing and the possibility, or not, for political solidarity? The

Verloo, Mieke. 2006. “Multiple Inequalities, Intersectionality and

Intersectionality, the assertion that social identity categories such

Intersectionality scholarship has emerged as one of the most

while race is less a determinant of social hierarchies in the lives of

poised to do in an attempt to address inequality across identity

and representation for political scientists.3 Indeed, these are all

Intersectionality and the Politics of

expands from its roots in black feminist theory to function as a

the compounded privileges of the powerful.4 Intersectionality can

A B rief Genealogy of Intersectionality

discrimination laws only to the extent in which their experiences

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and

It is through this analysis of discrimination law that Crenshaw

Writing in the late 1980s, Crenshaw’s work is a continuance of

the study of intersectionality, though more contemporary discus-

Here, I present some general premises of intersectionality as

1. Resisting additive models that treat categories of social identity as

1. Resisting Additive Models and Parallel Categories

nor are they identical; therefore, much is made of understanding

2. Antiessentialism and Diversity within Categories

3. Power as Shifting and Changing

Depending upon the context, those who are marginalized and

4. Privilege and Marginalization

the intersection. The imperative to change existing conditions and

Intersectionality, Agency, Institutions,

ongoing development of intersectionality as a research paradigm?

To be clear, I do not draw the types of distinctions as Baukje

intersectionality theorizing overstate the agency of individuals and

institutions incorporating women and men of color and white

regarded differently by their colleagues. Influence that would have

and behavior. Centering their experiences counters previous stud-

Some social sciences have been more open to the transformative

While Shields is most concerned with the field of psychology,

exclusively the purview of ethnographies and other qualitative

Seizing the Moment: Intersectionality and