Working with Intersectionality: Opportunities and Challenges for Gender+ Training

This paper explores the application of intersectionality in gender+ training. Against the backdrop of diversity mainstreaming and management, and integrated inequalities approaches in the European Union the professionalization of gender expertise is growing. Gender+ training is both symbolic of the development of this field and a channel for the transfer and circulation of feminist knowledge. I reflect on the use of intersectionality by trainers, theoretically and methodologically, across private, public and civil society contexts. I outline the possibilities and challenges on various levels, as these relate to participants themselves, institutional contexts and organisational cultures, as well as broader dynamics in the legitimacy of feminist knowledge transfer. Finally, I argue for intersectionality as an indispensable aspect of feminist pedagogies in the current neoliberal political economy of knowledge production and dissemination in the EU.