Intersectionality: serving inclusive or exclusive purposes? An analysis putting the emphasis on normativity

This paper argues for the need to critically scrutinize the normative agendas underlying the articulation of intersectionality in policy, to further develop our understanding of inequality dynamics. Intersectionality refers to the intersections between social identifiers – such as gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship or age – and analyses the hegemonies, marginalization and exclusions that these produce. Feminist policy scholars often rely on intersectionality to assess the inclusiveness and effectiveness of policies and thereby imply that intersectionality should be seen as an indication of good-quality policies. However, others recently noted that intersectionality can also be used as an exclusionary mechanism to construct differences between ingroups and outgroups, by either emphasizing the relevance of specific intersections or constructing these for exclusionary purposes. The difference between the two approaches resides in the fact that the former sees it as a normative criterion for inclusiveness, while the later uses it as an analytical tool exposing othering. This paper attempts to bridge these two applications of intersectionality by pointing to the normative agendas that underlie the policies under scrutiny by feminist scholars. It argues that intersectionality can be a normative criterion for both inclusion and exclusion, and it can also be applied as an analytical tool exposing dynamics of inclusion as well as of exclusion, all of it in both policies as well as in research on such policies. The paper demonstrates that it is always necessary to explicate if and how intersecting social identifiers are present in policy, but that intersectionality in policy should not be understood as signs of good-quality, inclusive policies per se. Instead, feminist policy scholars should scrutinize the normative agenda underlying the policies they interrogate and detect the function of intersecting social identifiers within them. We provide examples from migration policies and politics and propose a two-fold approach to detect normativity. First, researchers should identify the intersecting social identifiers at stake in constructing the problem that the policy under scrutiny is meant to address. Second, researchers should then examine the function of intersecting social identifiers in tackling the identified policy problem. Disentangling the function of intersectionality in (research on) policy making and implementation can help feminists scholars across different policy domains to further develop our understanding of how policies (re)produce inequality and to promote better ways to tackle these.