Summary: The Complexity Of Intersectionality

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Since the inception of the feminist movement, researchers have been closely aware of the limitations presented by using gender as a single analytical category. The article, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” written by Leslie McCall of Rutgers University, discusses intersectionality in feminist research, and different methodological approaches to studying intersectionality, as it tends to complicate issues by evaluating multiple facets of social life and categories of analysis (McCall, 2005, p. 1772). A complicated topic, intersectionality is defined as “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations” (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). Although intersectionality is noted as the most important…show more content…
The first approach is called anticategorical complexity, as it is based in the idea of deconstructing analytical categories (McCall, 2005, p. 1773). According to this method, life is too complex to make fixed categories anything but a simplifying social structure, which tend to produce inequalities between groups. The methodologies of anticategorical complexity were born during the feminist critiques on research, as women were not typically chosen as test subjects in clinical trials (McCall, 2005, p. 1776). It was at this moment that feminist theorists launched massive critiques on the validity of modern analytical categories and how they were incorporated into research. “The emphasis [of the criticism]…was on the socially constructed nature of gender and other categories and the fact that a wide range of different experiences, identities, and social locations fail to fit into a master category” (McCall, 2005, p. 1777). The premise of anticategorical complexity focuses on the idea that no one group or person fits neatly into the boxes that are created by categories, and the deconstruction of these categories is understood to represent the demolition of inequality. Feminists working under this method believe that violence and inequality is rooted in the relationships that are defined by race, class, sexuality, gender identification, and the projective deconstruction of these categories will allow for positive social change to

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