INTRODUCTION TO WHY RACE AND GENDER STILL MATTER: AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS

Namita Goswami, Maeve M. ODonovan and Lisa Yount

Our anthology is an important contribution to an undertheorized, emerging area of discussion within and surrounding academic philosophy; the anthology supports a conversation that has set its sights on nothing less than transforming the discipline. The very act of publishing a collection such as the present one, a collection that embodies the diversity and intersectional engagement about which it is writing, is important. The contributors are diverse in age, professional status, ethnic background, regional location and area of expertise, and together their voices produce a far richer account of why intersectionality in philosophy matters than any single introductory essay could on its own. Our task in the Introduction, then, is to orient the work of the text and its authors; we do so both by interrogating the general framework of intersectionality its definition, its history and its reception in the academy and by arguing that philosophy as an academic discipline benefits from embracing intersectional inquiry. The volume engages intersectionality, first and foremost, as an attempt to disrupt the epistemic closure so easily sustained by tradition. In these pages, philosophy emerges through voices whose soundings must be heard with the kind of theoretical secularism that transgresses disciplinary and topical boundaries. We believe that race and gender still matter until they dont.

Copyright
Defining Intersectionality

Generally speaking, intersectionality has been characterized as an awareness, an approach, an analysis, a tool, a strategy, a method and a theory.1 For some, the degree of variation and ambiguity in the term is reason enough for critique: a lack of definitional precision is equated with a lack of conceptual precision. Others suggest it is more important to understand what intersectionality does and what it enacts, as a form of praxis, than what its definition ought to be.2 As Kimberl Williams Crenshaw, Sumi Cho and Leslie McCall explain: [A]nswers to

Why Race and Gender Still Matter

Copyright

questions about what intersectional analysis is have been amply demonstrated by what people are deploying it to do.3 Furthermore, there is a deliberate and necessary open-endedness to intersectionality that makes it challenging to classify. An intersectional approach is expected to be fluid enough to adapt to the context at hand the conventions of a discipline, the policies of an organization, the practices of an institution, etc. to reveal oppression that was obscured in that given context, and, in the revealing, make room for possible transformation. As a transformative methodology, intersectionality captures not just the static outcomes of the problem it brings into view but its dynamics and lines of force as well.4 Intersectionality is marked by the kind of flexibility that attends to particularity while resisting definitional categorization. As such, it looks and performs differently against different backdrops, while maintaining a general core of commitments across contexts. It is important to consider, therefore, the provisional intention of the framework when analysing definitions of intersectionality. Although definitional and methodological certainty may grant confidence-inspiring predictability, expectations of certainty and predictability support rather than challenge the formulaic categorizations of difference that necessitated intersectional approaches in the first place. Perhaps the most sustained overview of intersectionality and its trajectories can be found in Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis. Here Crenshaw, Cho and McCall offer an operational definition:
Intersectionality is best framed as an analytic sensibility. If intersectionality is an analytic disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses, then what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term intersectionality, nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing [conceives] of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power.5

This description encompasses a cluster of commitments that are central to what intersectional work ascribes. Intersectionality aims to focus awareness on the experiences of people and the way in which those experiences are shaped and marked by social dynamics and forces. Such attunement requires sensitivity to multiplicity and the ability to apprehend complex constellations of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, nation and the like. In describing or naming these constellations and their effects, intersectional approaches allow marginalized groups to be recognized in ways that are often hidden in plain sight, and, in doing so, to have their realities expressed from grounds sufficiently complicated to open up possibilities for corrective response.

Introduction

We believe that Crenshaw, Cho and McCalls emphasis on the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power generates a worthy philosophical quest: can we properly employ a concept of non-antagonistic difference? Given that conceptual systems exclude difference for coherence and legibility, implied in the motivation to engage in intersectional work is a commitment to pluralism. The ability to see and attend to what is revealed by such work necessitates an understanding of difference that is non-oppositional. Because difference is not necessarily or inherently antagonistic, pluralism as an orientation towards diversity, and an appreciation for the way that diversity strengthens perspectives, provides a more complete picture of truth. In short, intersectionality is both pluralistic in nature and a way of encouraging pluralism in practice.

The History of Intersectionality

Taking seriously the claim that intersectionality involves a sensibility and a way of thinking that are attentive to questions of sameness and difference and power relations, that it foregrounds the ways that social categories align and converge to confer privilege and domination, one can trace (proto)intersectional analyses back for centuries. However, as is well known, it was Kimberl Crenshaws groundbreaking work in critical legal studies that first articulated the term for the academy. In Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, intersectionality was introduced as
a heuristic term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social movement politics. It exposed how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice.6

Copyright

In several class-action discrimination cases, Crenshaw showed how public policy designed to further social justice could, in practice, disadvantage black women employees. Pointedly using Black women as the starting point,7 Crenshaws analysis revealed how race and gender discrimination combined to produce specific effects on black womens lives.8 In the cases described, black women were denied redress as black women, through both anti-discrimination and seniority policies; because, on the one hand, blackness was unreflectively being associated with black men and, on the other hand, womanhood was unreflectively being associated with white women, black women were left unjustly unrepresented. In an article a few years later, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, Crenshaw elucidated three intersectional frameworks: structural intersectionality, political intersectionality and representational intersectionality.9 Structural intersectionality depicts how macro-level socio-political structures white supremacy, patriarchy, capi-

Why Race and Gender Still Matter

Copyright

talism, colonialism, ableism, heterosexism, climate change, etc. intersect to make experiences of groups and individuals qualitatively different from one another.10 Political intersectionality indicates the places where an individuals various political identities may come into conflict. For example, according to Crenshaw, women of colour are too often required to choose between mutually opposing identities black and female11 while black men and white women rarely experience such intersectional disempowerment.12 Representational intersectionality conveys the way that particular groups or individuals are interpellated within structures that impact how they are constructed by others as subjects and how they construct themselves as subjects.13 In this third domain of intersectional analysis, we see that institutional discourse often fails to convey the experience or consequences of marginalization such that marginalized groups or individuals are left using (only) personal narrative and histories to explore the impress of profound inequalities in their daily lives.14 Ultimately, Crenshaw reminds us that eliding race when taking up gender reinforces the oppression of people of colour,15 and anti-racist perspectives that elide patriarchy reinforce the oppression of women.16 For women of colour, embracing a single-lens focus, rather than an intersectional one, consolidates the invisibility of black women, foreclosing the possibility of a more empowering political discourse.17 Reflecting on the field of intersectional studies after more than twenty years of intersectional projects, Crenshaw, Cho and McCall identify three main ways that intersectionality has been typified. In conducting such a broad survey, their objective is to instigate further examination of how intersectionality as a conceptual framework and practical politics disrupts inequalities.18 Projects of the first type engage in systemic applications of intersectionality in context-specific inquiries seen in things like research or teaching19 comprising practical applications of intersectionality or examination of dynamic intersectional analytics.20 Additionally, projects of this kind strive to render intersectional analytical frameworks answerable to empirical realities. As such, disciplinary investments become subject to a ground-up approach whereby empirical research informs discipline-based methodologies.21 The second type consists of conceptual analyses. Such analyses examine the content conveyed by the concept of intersectionality, both in terms of scale of intervention and in terms of the conceptual frameworks exemplariness as an analytic methodology.22 Such interrogations reflexively follow the history of intersectionality as it emerges across disciplines; they include questions regarding the frameworks development and adaptations. Here conceptual labour also includes examination of whether or not intersectional analyses continue to resonate with the lives they are meant to better, remaining vigilant for the exclusions, omissions and disavowals that constitute any conceptual system.23

Introduction

The third type is comprised of those engagements that are activist in nature. These include activism that deploys intersectional analyses for specific interventions.24 The existence of the third type further underscores the claim that intersectionality is not only an academic endeavour; it has normative implications for transforming power relations that enforce inequalities through very specific logics of sameness and difference.25 Understanding the many faces of intersectionality and how intersectional practices have manifested and migrated in and out of the academy allows for a mapping of those places where intersectionality has been both embraced and disregarded.

Receptivity towards Intersectionality in the Academy

Intersectional analyses take place in academic locales that interrogate how systems of domination and marginalization are inherently complex.26 Intersectionality has proven to be a useful device in disciplines such as history, sociology, literature and anthropology; in fields such as post-colonial, critical race and feminist theory, philosophy of disability, ethnic studies, LGBTQ studies and legal theory;27 and in international human rights work and public policy initiatives.28 Essentially, where intersectionality has taken root in the academy, it has been intermingled with the conventions of the discipline at hand, and it has served to create interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary connections. When exploring locations in academia where intersectionality has been welcomed as a legitimate and valuable kind of analysis, it is important to note that those domains tend to share an orientation that is more likely to already embrace pluralism and inclusivity, as it is reflected in settings that display those commitments in practice and demography.29 One is led to wonder if an inclusive and pluralistic climate in a discipline is a necessary precondition for the acceptance of intersectionality, or alternatively, if an openness to the mindset and its use could give rise to the possibility of a more pluralistic and inclusive environment in an otherwise rigid field. In places where there is resistance to recognizing intersectionality, there are two basic conditions worth noting. First, of course, the political climate of any given academic field expresses a particular relation to the larger social power structure. The categories and concepts employed in disciplines reflect prevailing arrangements of privilege. Any interpretations of intersectionality are subject to the discursive conventions of the field in question. Thus [i]ntersectionality neither travels outside nor is unmediated by the very field of race and gender power that it interrogates.30 Research conventions that are part and parcel of a discipline can (and often do) bring to bear normative presuppositions that render certain truth claims incoherent or illegible. Such disciplinary cultures reinstate

Copyright

Why Race and Gender Still Matter

Copyright
Why Race and Gender Still Matter

the very erasure intersectionality attempts to disrupt.31 Moreover, even inherently interdisciplinary fields that are predicated on experiences of marginalization and disempowerment are not averse to mutual distrust and antagonism; for instance, African American feminism has rightly challenged post-colonial theorys Eurocentrism, and disability studies and LGBTQ studies have rightly challenged the foreclosures of both African American feminism and post-colonial theory. We must pay attention to how the politics of knowledge production play out at the institutional level, for these politics constitute the context within which insurgent projects are formulated. Disciplinary and intradisciplinary tangles over resources and intellectual genealogies influence the reception of and engagement with intersectional projects. As Crenshaw, Cho and McCall emphasize, Both the ideas at issue and the responses that insurgent ideas engender reflect structural relations that are dynamically constituted by the very forces being interrogated.32 A second consideration for why intersectional analyses are undermined, overlooked, delegitimated or altogether absent is the often personal risks associated with questioning the practices of a discipline. There are professional motivations to uphold the status quo and tangible negative consequences for not doing so. If intersectionality is met with hostility or is cast as a substandard theory in a field, then one is incentivized to distance oneself from it. Barbara Tomlinson argues, uninterrogated scholarly and social conventions and habits of argument33 combine to distort the potentiality of powerful intersectional analysis and serve to damage scholarship and activism that goes against the grain.34 Some of these social conventions include the political and social cultures of departments and institutions as well as the nature of academic publishing itself, replete with professional pressures, reward structures, and credentialing mechanisms.35 Too often, scholars who problematize conventional disciplinary protocols become targets of the very power relations they are questioning. Consequently, [c]ritical analysis of institutional and discursive power is rarely a sufficient prophylactic against its reach.36 Having surveyed the general reception of intersectionality in the academy, let us turn specifically to the discipline of philosophy to see how the aforementioned forces are in play.

Although an intersectional approach has been productive in some isolated instances in philosophy,37 or in specializations located on the periphery or margins of the discipline,38 intersectionality is largely ignored as a philosophical theme or framework within the larger discipline.39 What in the discipline may cultivate such practices? As a producer of knowledge, philosophy, like all disciplines, holds fast to an identity that demarcates and differentiates itself from other schools of thought.

Introduction

Yet these differentiations seem to be overly antagonistic for philosophy. For example, within the discipline there are conflicting factions such as the contemporary Anglo-American and Continental European schools, and there are philosophical traditions that are met with suspicion and are often dismissed as not constituting real philosophy or are set over and against what is valorized as traditional philosophy (e.g. feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, philosophy of disability, etc.). Perhaps it is the political edge that these philosophical traditions hold; perhaps the negative reception comes from the dominant, dogmatic view that hierarchizes theory over practice, or one that holds to a style of theorizing that privileges universals over particulars. In such disciplinary terrain, not only is intersectionality absent as a philosophical framework, intersectionality is also not recognized as a legitimate conceptual framework. There are racist, sexist and ethnocentric ramifications of such exclusionary disciplinary practices: minority theoretical contributions are denied their genealogical due, and interest remains in European frameworks from which all other frameworks are ostensibly derived. Ultimately, the exclusionary tendency of philosophy is detrimental for a discipline whose central tenet is self-knowledge. In erecting borders and boundaries that preclude precisely such self-knowledge, philosophy is ensuring its own irrelevance and obsolescence. Part of our project in this volume is to discern why intersectionality matters for philosophical experience such that scholarship germane to understanding difference will no longer be excluded via the usual clichs and stereotypes (intersectional scholarship is mere politics and ideology rather than skilful conceptual labour, etc.). Because the best intersectional work is being done for the most part outside of philosophy, the present volume seeks to demonstrate precisely the theoretical and philosophical care and innovative scrupulousness required by intersectional scholarship. That most of this work is interdisciplinary in nature should not be surprising, nor that it demands on the part of philosophers an openness to different voices, ways of writing and alternate intellectual genealogies. Philosophers interested in rigorous examination of the question of sameness and difference and relations of power must inevitably draw on work being done outside the too often narrow confines of philosophy. We must forge these interdisciplinary alliances even at the risk of our work being demeaned as unphilosophical. By situating this volumes labour alongside the innovations and interventions of scholars in various disciplines, we seek to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of intersectionality as such. In addition, we seek to show how bringing intersectionality to bear on philosophy enables precisely the forms of understating and self-reflection that philosophy as an academic pursuit and personal calling is meant to enable. Clashing, disparate realities and forms of conceptual labour ought not to result in such difference being cast aside as inherently combative and contradictory. Instead, intersectionality is that particular concentration of under-

Copyright

Why Race and Gender Still Matter

Copyright

standing that is meaningful for those who have too often been precluded from the actual historical dynamics of building a philosophical tradition. Some of the resistance to embracing an intersectional perspective reveals dimensions about the discipline of philosophy that are built in to the practice of what is dominantly deemed real philosophy, and some of the resistance reveals dimensions about the discipline that are inimical to plurality itself. Although philosophy at its best is strongly pluralistic, in that it vigorously questions assumptions and foundations and through that questioning invites alternative perspectives to be included and examined, it often falls short of this mark when it is unreflectively dismissive of world views and approaches it labels as outsider. This territoriality undermines difference and produces an atmosphere that is unwelcoming and hostile to many. It is surely no coincidence that a climate that is chilly to women and people of colour, or that does not adequately reflect diversity,40 will also most likely be dismissive of intersectionality. Because we know too much about how philosophy as a discipline fares when it comes to even the most basic courtesies towards the paltry diversity in its midst, we take for granted the importance of intersectionality for disrupting normative cultures that determine value based on already decided assignations of sameness and difference. The much-publicized state of the discipline has brought to light how dismally philosophy fares when it comes to leaving room for others.41 According to Sally Haslanger, too many talented women and philosophers of colour have left the field, unable or unwilling to fight the battles that are unavoidable for women and minorities seeking full-time work in philosophy departments: it is very hard to find a place in philosophy that isnt actively hostile toward women and minorities, or at least assumes that a successful philosopher should look and act like a (traditional, white) man.42 Scholar Naomi Zack writes, Intersectionality requires a redirection of philosophy, in method as well as subject matter.43 We agree that this is precisely the case, and ought to be the case for the betterment of philosophy; yet, for Zack, this is a reason to be suspicious of the mandates of intersectionality. She questions whether the demands of intersectionality benefit women of colour. However, we believe that such scholarship facilitates the progress of all women in philosophy rather than the implicit or explicit constituency of traditional feminist philosophy as non-disabled, white, heterosexual women. Largely, Zacks concern is that intersectionality produces insurmountable identity politics that relegate subjects to intractable political positions that no longer have the ability to see or act upon a uniting commonality.44 She argues that when intersection theory intersects with academic philosophy, it keeps feminist women of color out of the field, as a matter of academic taxonomy, because the thinkers of interest to them are not accepted as philosophers.45 Zack blames intersectionality for creating conditions that encourage women of color to pursue their scholarship

Introduction

in academic disciplines that allow focus on minority groups as subject matter.46 For her, this explains the retreat to fields like ethnic studies, African American studies, Asian studies, Hispanic studies and the like. But, upon closer inspection, this is evidently less an influence of intersectionality and more a clear indication of the perils of a field without it. Either way, we are left to consider: what would philosophy be like if those outside the dominant discourse their experiences, their writing, their communities were permitted to drive the inquiry? Because this question serves as the impetus for the present volume, our hope is to contribute to a revitalized discussion of intersectionality. We have created this discussion by enabling the diverse voices in this volume to lead the way in changing the discourse in philosophy. What this means on both the theoretical and practical levels is that the volume uses philosophy for intersectional analyses and contributes intersectional analyses to philosophy. As such, the volume recognizes that intersectionality is a fundamentally collaborative exercise that disrupts exclusionary disciplinary identity politics. These newer and more established voices provide evidence of the diversity that exists within philosophy and illustrates the ways in which employment of an intersectional conceptual framework generates novel analyses and new tools for dismantling oppression.

The first half of this anthology includes selections that tend to the conceptual work of expanding and clarifying the definition of intersectionality. In Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality, 1830s1930s, Kathryn T. Gines draws attention to the ways that intersectional analyses operated in black thought, activism and organizing between the 1830s and 1930s. In her view, even though their approach to gender presents a more limited and additive analysis than their treatment of race and racism, these early models serve as prototypes for more contemporary, explicit expressions of intersectionality. Following on this reclamation of intersectionality from bygone centuries, in Past as Prologue: Intersectional Analysis from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First, Kristin Waters contrasts the long-standing multivariable analysis standards of other disciplines the ones that require representative populations in their studies over and against the way that the field of philosophy permits the absence of such oversight. She argues that the intersectional approach, which is a prerequisite for black women social and political philosophers, ought to be required for all philosophers who theorize on human activities. Further, to maintain the strong version of intersectionality called for in her selection, she argues that the concept of intersectionality must be grounded in a theory of oppression and be tied to epistemological approaches that provide substance and authority for its claims.

Copyright
Intersectional Interventions

10

Why Race and Gender Still Matter

Copyright

The emphasis on oppression is also foregrounded in Kristie Dotsons Making Sense: The Multistability of Oppression and the Importance of Intersectionality. This chapter illustrates how intersectionality mandates identification of multiple social relationships in complex social worlds for the purpose of rendering visible experiences that have been theoretically erased by prevailing practices of knowledge production concerning oppression. Dotson explores the multistable nature of oppression as a social phenomenon, and shows how intersectionality, by virtue of its demand for continual, open-ended consolidation, is a valuable tool for understanding such social phenomenon. Fluidity and an emphasis on necessary incompleteness are also taken up in Reinvigorating Intersectionality as a Provisional Concept. In her essay, Anna Carastathis challenges the triumphal narrative of political completion that surrounds intersectionality, which helps to cement the impression of mainstream feminisms arrival at a post-racial moment. She surmises that we should approach intersectionality as a provisional concept that disorients entrenched essentialist cognitive habits. Rather than assume that intersectionality has a stable, positive definition, she suggests intersectionality anticipates rather than delivers the normative or theoretical goals often imputed to it. Big Red Sun Blues: Intersectionality, Temporality and the Police Order of Identity Politics, by Tina Chanter, posits a provocative way of formulating identity politics through Jacques Rancires notion of the police order. Chanter points out that intersectionality theory requires and relies upon identity politics, even as it works to resist it. In making the case that identity politics functions as a reflection of the police order a structure of authority that keeps clear lines of demarcation and circumscription and that passes them off as the natural and true order identity politics often serves to reproduce the very thing it intends to dislodge: a hegemonic group identity. As such, if we must get beyond the confines of identity politics, and intersectionality is reliant upon them, then we must also eventually get beyond intersectionality as well, in her account. The second part of the anthology includes essays that engage in the activity of applying intersectional analyses. In Continental Feminist Philosophy Meets Intersectionality: Rosi Braidottis Work, Iveta Jusov showcases some examples of the work intersectionality has been deployed to do by Continental feminist philosophers in the Netherlands as they search for adequate responses to the increasingly polarized political and cultural climate in their country. The practice of pitting issues of sexuality against culture, rather than viewing them as intertwined, has proven dangerously useful for advancing anti-Muslim and antiimmigration agendas.Jusov brings feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti into the conversation to dissolve the political and social schisms produced by the polarization of the categories of gender/sexuality and ethnicity/religion in Dutch society.

Introduction

11

A different view of stereotype threat and culture wars is examined by Melissa M. Kozma and Jeanine Weekes Schroer in Purposeful Nonsense, Intersectionality and the Mission to Save Black Babies. They show how what they term purposeful nonsense is operative in insidious discourse marked by problematic intelligibility, disinterest in the truth and inflammatory rhetoric. Part of the way that purposeful nonsense functions, they argue, relies on taking advantage of harmful stereotypes and denigrating narratives that are already present in our culture. Purposeful nonsense both draws upon harmful ideology and fortifies it. The effect is that members of oppressed social groups are confronted with disparaging ideology, while its authors are free to deny responsibility for it. Purposeful nonsense disguised as merely logically confused discourse is a key factor in maintaining an oppressive and unjust society; however, feminist, black feminist and intersectional analysis contextualizes purposeful nonsense, potentially disrupting its harmful influence. Marie Draz continues this examination of the effects of disparaging ideology on oppressed social groups in Transitional Subjects: Gender, Race and the Biopolitics of the Real. This essay explicates the tension between Foucauldian queer feminism and transgender studies on the status of the real as a result, at least in part, of the perceived implications of Foucaults account of disciplinary power. She argues that turning to the relationship between transgender phenomena and biopower transforms the way we understand how realness plays out at the level of both the individual and the population. Focusing on the relationship between transgender experience and biopolitical population management requires us to address race in ways that not only proves instructive for queer feminist philosophys historical problems with both trans and race issues, but also paves the way for an intersectional, biopolitical approach to embodiment and identity more generally. Transgender experience and biopolitical population management frame the case of Caster Semenya. In her essay Caster Semenya: Reasoning Up Front with Race, Janine Jones takes up the controversial decision to verify Semenyas sex through chromosome testing after her victory at the 2009 World Track and Field Championships. Jones uses this event to show how some intersectional theorists mistakenly bring in race, when, instead, in cases similar to this one, race must be understood as intervening prior to the construction of sex-gender status, not subsequent to its invention. Jones reveals the theoretical damage done by eschewing race as an essential component in an intersectional, interlocking analysis of Semenyas sex-gender identity. Heather Rakess Philosophical Happiness and the Relational Production of Philosophical Space draws on the work of contemporary theorists Sara Ahmed and Aimee Carrillo Rowe to argue that legitimated philosophical spaces are affectively and relationally produced, and that they are possessively invested in philosophical happiness. Philosophical happiness is a kind of ongoing content-

Copyright

12

Why Race and Gender Still Matter

ment and comfort with and in philosophy a sense of belonging in, with and to it, and a consistent sense of pleasure doing it. In exposing the affective and relational motivations that subtend much of philosophy, the argument is for feminist philosophy to reorient itself towards those subjects and works that are missing from philosophy in order to make space for a different kind of belonging. Happiness is followed by health in Jennifer Scuros offering, Theory Can Heal: Constructing an Ethos of Intervention. She comments on how philosophers may treat the voicing of harm as a site marker for future theoretical construction. Scuro applies an idea described by bell hooks: that theory can heal. Utilizing an analogy with bridge construction, Scuro argues that a shift in philosophical style and tone ought to take place soon within the profession. Exclusion and territorialism have been treated as acceptable practice or even promoted within academic philosophy as well as many forms of theoretical fabrication. Thus, an incorporation of intersectionality and an appreciation of diverse authorship are still on the horizon.

Conclusion

Copyright

The present volume is a contribution to the overall goal of climate change in philosophy. It dedicates itself entirely to showcasing innovative intersectional scholarship and its contributions to the discipline, writ large. We seek to challenge the boundaries that often exclude insightful and beneficial perspectives and to contribute to a revitalized discussion of intersectionality. Given the complicated theoretical and practical terrain, this edited volume takes stock of the gains made by intersectionality in the wider discipline of philosophy while remaining cognizant of the challenges facing those who adopt such frameworks. Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach attempts to hear others into speech because philosophical understanding of our complex interrelated world still matters. As a result, this volume is an integration of life and work insofar as it develops philosophy by honouring the contributions of intersectional scholarship. Building such bridges provides critical tools from a variety of disciplines and theoretical frameworks to meet the challenges that remain for social justice within the disciplinary professions and without. If our task is to show how the axes of power and inequality operate to our collective and individual disadvantage,47 then intersectionality is important for philosophy because it makes space for plurality within the discipline, conceptually and demographically, by seeking a non-antagonistic understanding of difference; as such, intersectionality makes for better philosophers.