IR and its Intersectionality Problem: One Discipline, Multiple Lifeworlds

Intersectionality, a concept developed by U.S. legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw about junctions of race and gender that interact to oppress Black women, has become a key concept in feminist and gender studies and has been taken up in many social science disciplines. In International Relations, however, while some scholars use the term “intersectionality” in their research, little explicit theorizing has been done to contend with the intersecting, confounding, contradictory ways that diverse voices unsettle the IR discipline. Within feminist IR in particular, scholars grapple with how gendered understandings of the world change with geography, coloniality, and racialized identities, though gender remains the main axis of subordination. In fact, the attempts that feminist IR makes to include “diverse” voices does not disturb the colonial foundations of the discipline and does not see, for example, how postcolonial feminism is not homogenous, how class shapes material experiences in the world, and how disability destabilizes the very idea of what it means to be a woman. Much like queer theorizing has pushed feminist IR scholars to consider sexuality and rethink the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit, our intervention is not to argue the “oppression olympics” but to highlight the ways in which feminist IR is a conservative project. We find that a fundamental misunderstanding of diverse ways of being and knowing—ontology and epistemology—plague feminist IR in many of the same ways that feminist IR critiqued the mainstream IR discipline. Ultimately, we propose a path toward an “intersectional IR” that incorporates multiple lifeworlds.