Intersectionality Theory in Sociocultural Anthropology

Abstract

Accepting the premise that sociocultural anthropology is colonialist and Audre Lorde’s maxim that the master’s tools cannot remake the master’s house, I consider the value of a tool from outside the master’s house to reconstruct sociocultural anthropology. Intersectionality, variously known as a theory, a lens, or a metaphor, is rooted in U.S. Black women’s abolitionism of the mid-nineteenth century, which argued that rights-seeking efforts framed out Black women. The 1970s and 1980s brought increased attention, especially from Black American feminists, to the multiplying effects of the intersections of race, gender, and class. In 1989, the term intersectionality first appeared in print, and a theory was named. Since then, many fields of study and activism have embraced intersectionality. Edward Said posited that radical theories lose their edge when they travel outside their original context. I explore intersectionality’s travels to sociocultural anthropology—its chronology, advocates, and transformations. Although barely visible in much of sociocultural anthropology’s Whitestream, intersectionality has gained not only in numbers but also a stronger voice since its first published appearance in 2001. Nearly two centuries have passed since intersectionality’s origins in U.S. enslavement, but interlocking conditions of inequality pervade the world today, nurturing intersectionality’s radical ethos in sociocultural anthropology.

1. Introduction

Sociocultural anthropology has experienced many theoretical turns throughout its history, but they have done little to alter its colonial principles and practices.1 One reason may be found in Black feminist activist Audre Lorde’s (1979/1984) insight that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.2 This article considers a tool from outside the master’s house that does more than merely redecorate the house of sociocultural anthropology, specifically its elitism, objectivism, and extractivism. By elitism, I mean the domination of knowledge making, keeping, and sharing by those who persistently occupy the top of the anthropology power hierarchy, that is, mainly propertied, binary White people, especially men. By objectivism, I refer to the scientific standard of excellence in anthropology as requiring a position of supposedly depoliticized objectivity. Objectivism is a mask shielding sociocultural anthropology’s elitism and extractivism. By extractivism, I point to a privileged approach to research that involves collecting and repurposing epistemic resources of studied people with no responsibility to their wellbeing. In short, I refer to the combination of elitism, objectivism, and extractivism in traditional sociocultural anthropology as the White Possessive.3 Even when conducted “in people’s best interests”, traditional sociocultural anthropology is patronizing. More seriously, it can be viewed as constituting epistemic violence.

Within sociocultural anthropology, opinions about the condition of the house range from those who find nothing wrong with it and defend it from attackers (Lewis, 2014) to others who argue for burning it down (Jobson, 2020). Many academic sociocultural anthropologists, especially those of color, have abandoned the house, changing their appointment to a multidisciplinary department or institute where they and their work find a more supportive space.4 As a resident of the house of sociocultural anthropology, I am keenly aware of its colonialism,5 and I am convinced by Audre Lorde’s insight. But I see hope for reconstructing the house with tools crafted by non-anthropologists, that is, people with insights who live outside the house, and by outsiders within the house, that is, anthropologists who have themselves experienced marginality and discrimination.

One such tool is decolonization. Rooted in anti-colonial independence movements that fought extractive European political control, its scope has expanded to expunging colonial infiltration in all areas of life, including academia. Decolonization has gained traction in sociocultural anthropology since the 1990s, inspired by the work of what Allen and Jobson (2016) call the decolonizing generation of Black anthropologists. While a pathbreaking intervention in sociocultural anthropology, decolonization has focused on racism and mainly sidelined other dimensions of social inequality and exclusion including gender, sexuality, class, age, and ability, to name some. I argue for a related approach to dismantle and reconstruct the colonial house of sociocultural anthropology: intersectionality. Like decolonization, intersectionality combines critical theory of power relations, innovative methods, and a commitment to praxis.6

The distinctive difference of intersectionality is its recognition of the simultaneous effects of multiple structural forces or institutions such as sexism, racism, elitism, ageism, homophobia, and ableism, on people’s life experiences and well-being that must be examined simultaneously. Intersectionality offers the resounding insight that such convergences multiply vulnerability and risk rather than simply being additive. Its exposure of the intersections and their effects reveals the epistemological narrowness and flatness of single-axis thinking that characterizes much traditional sociocultural anthropology. Intersectionality is not theory in the Western scientific sense of testable hypotheses and replicable results. It is instead a metaphor, framework, lens, prism, or paradigm (Collins & Bilge, 2016/2020; Hancock, 2016; May, 2015). A tool in Lorde’s sense, it offers a rethinking and redoing of sociocultural anthropology based on social justice.7

This article explores the extent to which sociocultural anthropologists, through their publications, have adopted intersectionality, who the adopters and strongest allies are, and how they employ it. The first section summarizes intersectionality’s origin story to recognize its creators and provide context for this study. A brief review of traveling theory follows. I then describe my search for intersectionality in sociocultural anthropology and findings about its travelogue. The last section suggests factors that may account for its slow arrival and its continued marginality in Whitestream sociocultural anthropology, poses the question of its possible deradicalization, and offers thoughts about its future.

2. Intersectionality’s Origin Story

Sociocultural anthropologists have long valued origin stories as windows into social worlds. Critical race theorists and feminist theorists champion origin stories as a way of recognizing and respecting often-erased founders. Here, for both reasons, I offer highlights of intersectionality’s origin story.

Its story begins with four words: “ain’t I a woman?”8 This iconic phrase is associated with Sojourner Truth (c.1797–1880), a Black woman, and her speech at the Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. Originally named Isabella Baumfree, she was born enslaved to a Dutch settler family living in southern New York State (Mabee, 1995; Painter, 1996). Dutch was her first language, but she began learning English after being sold to an English-speaking family when she was nine years old (Mabee, 1995, p. 4). In 1827, New York State abolished slavery, and she was freed. Years later, Sojourner Truth became an eloquent public speaker and was invited to abolitionist conventions throughout the northeastern U.S. At the time of her 1851 speech, no audio-recording technology existed, and Sojourner Truth created no written version of it. The phrase “ain’t I a woman?” first appeared in a version of her speech published years after the speech (Mabee, 1995, pp. 67–78; Painter, 1996, pp. 164–178). The Sojourner Truth Project (2023), however, provides a version recorded earlier by a reporter who attended the convention and took simultaneous notes. It does not include the phrase, suggesting that the later version distorted her words. The speech, however, did not need to include that phrase to validate Sojourner Truth’s contribution to intersectionality. She clearly defined her position as both Black and female and argued that its combination was the cause of her exclusion; White suffragists were fighting for White women’s voting rights while the abolitionist movement supported Black men’s voting rights. Both failed to include her as a person deserving of rights; she was in double jeopardy on account of her race and gender.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) is another significant Black woman contributor to intersectional thinking (May, 2007, pp. 181–188). Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, and emancipated in 1863, Cooper went on, at the age of 64 years, to become the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree (Hutchinson, 1981). A feminist orator, writer, teacher, and international human rights advocate, she was active for several decades starting in the late nineteenth century. Her most well-known phrase, “when and where I enter”, mentioned in a speech of 1886, argues that Black women are distinctly disadvantaged. She later elaborated: “The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country…She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both” (Cooper, 1892/1998, pp. 112–113). Cooper understood how gender, race, and power are intertwined and that their combined negative effects must be addressed through informed praxis (May, 2007). Despite some contemporary criticism about inconsistencies in her thinking, specifically her acceptance of a White view of domesticated womanhood (Lemert, 1998, p. 1), Cooper nonetheless stands as a key figure in intersectionality’s origin story.

Moving forward several decades brings us to The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977/2015), created by several Black lesbian feminist activists living in the Boston area. According to feminist scholar, Taylor (2017, p. 4), writing on the fortieth anniversary of the CRC Statement, “It is difficult to quantify the enormity of the political contribution made by the women of the Combahee River Collective …”. They described the oppression of Black women as interlocking, occurring simultaneously, and therefore demanding new approaches in theory and political action. Importantly, they included Marxist analysis in their thinking, adding the dimension of class to gender and race. Triple jeopardy enters the story.

The 1980s brought a time of vibrant growth. Two books published in 1981 by Black feminists addressed the now classic triad of gender, race, and class: bell hooks’ ain’t I a woman: black women and feminism (Hooks, 1981) and Davis’ Women, Race, and Class (Davis, 1981). Both trace the roots of contemporary Black women’s status in the U.S. to enslavement and address the racism of both patriarchy and the White women’s rights movement. A few years later, Black feminist sociologist Collins (1986, 1989) used the term interlocking in two articles. Her 1989 article appeared in a Special Issue of the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society entitled Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Women’s Lives. In it, she critiques Eurocentric masculinist thought as reflecting “the interests and standpoint of its creators” (751) and argues for a new epistemology built on Black feminist thinking. At the same time, Black feminist sociocultural anthropologist Moses (1989), in a report on Black women in U.S. academia, described the combined effects of racism and sexism. A major milestone was reached, in the same year, with the first published appearance of the term intersectionality in an article by Black feminist legal scholar Crenshaw (1989). Crenshaw describes a case in which U.S. law failed to recognize Black women as a category because of its inability to think beyond the categories of White people and Black men. Collins (2000), in her trailblazing book, Black Feminist Thought, used the term intersecting oppressions, and soon thereafter she adopted the term intersectionality. Intersectionality was named. While Crenshaw is credited with coining the term, Collins and others were thinking along the same lines at the same time.

Thirty years of publications, led by Crenshaw and Collins, have inspired scholarship and activism around the world. Their work constitutes the canon for intersectionality theory and its six key features: Black feminist activists in the U.S. laid its foundations of intersectionality and propelled it into the twenty-first century; intersectionality’s core argument is that multiple social axes or dimensions interlock, are mutually constituted, have multiplicative effects, and must be considered simultaneously; gender, race, and class are core axes, but many others are germane depending on the context, including sexuality, age, ability, caste, ethnicity, indigeneity, citizenship, location, and religion; intersectionality aims at revealing, understanding, describing, and addressing power inequalities, oppression, and marginalization; research design should be collaborative and involve methods that valorize narratives of lived experiences of disadvantaged people; and intersectionality is not politically neutral but transparently positioned to expose social injustice and advance social justice by linking theory and praxis. Intersectionality offers a radical tool from outside the master’s house that holds promise to disrupt, de-center, and redefine traditional paradigms in sociocultural anthropology.

3. Traveling Theory

As a distinct field of inquiry, the history of ideas goes back hundreds of years. Without detailing that history, and while acknowledging Foucault’s (1972) archaeology of knowledge project and his attention to how discourses migrate and change, I focus on an essay by Said (1983), who coined the phrase, traveling theory. He describes a “discernible pattern” of four stages in how social theories travel: point of origin, distance and contexts traversed, conditions of acceptance and resistance, and, last, when “the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses…” (pp. 226–227). In his analysis of Lukacs’ theory of reification, Said argues that its travels beyond its original context led to domestication and deradicalization. Relatedly, feminist theorist Mohanty (2013) describes what happened to antiracist feminist materialist thinking, including intersectionality, when it traveled through time from its radical origins to the era of U.S. neoliberalism. Using the example of her work, she argues that neoliberalism and postmodernism have depoliticized radical feminist theory and systemic materialist analysis in favor of “purely discursive (representational)” approaches (986). Preventing that dissolution, Mohanty argues, involves unflagging critical scholarship and activism.

Turning to intersectionality theory’s travels, Collins (2015, pp. 6–7) asks which aspects of it travel successfully, which are accepted, which are not, and whether the initial radical intent is inevitably lost. Collins views the “increasingly disparate” intersectional literature positively, as contributing to a “rich terrain” of scholarship, and she celebrates the benefits in the expansion of intersectional research and its potential to influence policy (pp. 11–13). In an introduction to a special issue on intersectionality in the Du Bois Review, Crenshaw and three co-authors review intersectionality’s travels across time, space, disciplines, and issues, celebrating its enthusiastic global engagement and the richness and diversity of its manifestations in various academic disciplines as having a social life, inspiring coalitions across diverse fields of interest and groups (Carbado et al., 2013). They argue that intersectionality’s generativity lies in two features: it resists having a fixed identity, and it is always particularized. That is, its embrace of fluidity and its recognition of its incompleteness are strengths, not weaknesses. Like Collins, they applaud the expansion of intersectionality into unexplored domains and note its continued generativity wherever it goes. In summing up their thoughts on what intersectionality is, they state: “intersectionality is what intersectionality does” (p. 312).

4. Intersectionality’s Travels to Sociocultural Anthropology

Beginning in the 1990s, intersectionality theory spread to many of the social sciences, humanities, and professions such as education, health, and social work.9 Collins faced a challenge in 2012 when planning a graduate sociology seminar on intersectionality because “so much intersectionality scholarship had been published” (Collins, 2015, p. 2).10 At that time, someone creating a sociocultural anthropology seminar would not have been overwhelmed by an abundance of sources by sociocultural anthropologists using intersectionality theory explicitly. Only 10 such publications in sociocultural anthropology had appeared by 2012, hardly enough to fill a syllabus. Now (in 2023), with dozens of explicitly intersectional publications by sociocultural anthropologists, one would, like Collins in 2012, face a dilemma of choice in selecting readings for a seminar.

4.1. Assembling the Collection

My goal was to gather as many sources as I could find that are explicitly intersectional—specifically, using the words intersectionality or closely related words in a way that conforms to some degree with the canon. This frame excludes many important sociocultural anthropology publications that are implicitly intersectional in their exposure of social inequality and power hierarchies. I see value, however, in spotlighting the tip of the spear of intersectional thinking, knowing that much valuable work remains outside this discussion. I defend my position on the grounds that affiliation with intersectionality, an approach that emerged from Black women’s historic experiences of oppression, exclusion, and injustice, signals an author’s recognition of and solidarity with those experiences that add an edge to their research, writing, and praxis.

Using the search term intersectional, I first turned to my university library’s electronic catalogue and Google Scholar. To expand the search, I created a list of anthropology journals, published in English. I considered a journal to be an anthropology journal if its mission focuses on anthropology, if anthropologists are prominent in editorial leadership positions, and if it mainly publishes articles by anthropologists. Compiling the list involved gleaning journals from disparate sources starting with the American Anthropological Association’s list of affiliated journals and some citation indexing sources. Concerned about the preponderance of U.S. journals on the list, I devoted additional effort to finding English-language journals published outside the U.S.11 I also created a list of interdisciplinary journals likely to include articles by sociocultural anthropologists starting with journals with which I am familiar and expanding the list over time, usually by chance.12 I next searched each journal individually using my university library’s online search option. Within each journal, I selected the search option for “article title or keyword”. Using intersectionality as the keyword captured sources that include the related words of intersections, intersectional, and intersecting. I learned that search engines most ably find sources that use these terms in the title and, in the case of journal articles, in the abstract and keywords if provided. Therefore, books are more elusive than articles because they do not have searchable abstracts or keywords, and book chapters are the most elusive category because they lack abstracts and keywords, and their titles seem to get buried in the databases.

Keyword searches yielded about three-fourths of the sources in the collection. I discovered the remaining sources, including every chapter, in other ways: following hunches about an author whose work was not yet in the collection and searching their publications, seeing if authors of works already in collection might have additional publications, and sheer chance, including discoveries via my Twitter feed, anthropologyworks.com. I was disappointed that scanning References Cited lists in the collection’s sources yielded few additional titles.

The seemingly simple criterion that the author—or in the case of multiple authors, at least one author—is an anthropologist was not always easy to assess. One cannot assume that the author of an article in a journal that has the word anthropology in its title is a sociocultural anthropologist because some journals, including some affiliated with the American Anthropological Association, publish articles by non-anthropologists. I considered an author employed in an anthropology department to be an anthropologist regardless of their doctoral degree: if an anthropology department hires someone with a doctorate in sociology or education, I accept that as validation of anthropological identity. Some anthropologists, however, hold appointments in departments other than anthropology, and some have positions outside academia. In these cases, I tried to learn if their doctoral degree was in anthropology or an interdisciplinary field with an anthropological component. If so, I counted them as anthropologists.

Another selection criterion is the explicit use of intersectionality or closely related terms. I developed this guideline: the source must use the word intersectionality or intersectional or intersecting at least once and in some degree of conformity with canonical principles. I excluded publications addressing intersecting discourses as in interdisciplinarity with no connection to power, inequality, marginalization, or exclusion. For edited books, the selection criterion for including the book in the collection is that most chapters are explicitly intersectional. Another criterion recognizes the importance of intersectionality’s basic premise that at least two axes must be addressed. Given the default category of White men, a study of White women does not qualify because it addresses only one axis (gender). Most sources answer to another basic principle established by Crenshaw that axes of difference are best understood as institutional structures—sexism, racism, classism, and more—rather than as personal identity, although some of the studies in the collection are borderline in terms of this principle.

4.2. Travelogue

The collection includes 85 sources spanning the years 2001–2022. Fifteen are books, sixteen are chapters, and fifty-four are articles, The following discussion offers highlights of the publications’ timing, positionality of the author, publishers’ prestige, and research topics.

Chronology: Black feminist activist McClaurin (2001b) published the first source in the collection, the introductory chapter to her edited book on Black feminist anthropology. Four years passed until the next publication appeared, an article by Black feminist anthropologist Mullings in Transforming Anthropology (2005). In 2007, three chapters were published, all in one book co-edited by Mullings and public health expert Schulz; they are authored by Morgen, Mullings and Schulz, and Cheryl. The same year also saw the publication of the first sole-authored book, by Black feminist activist Caldwell. McClaurin, Mullings, and Caldwell stand as Black feminist founders of intersectionality in sociocultural anthropology, with Mullings being the most well known and frequently cited. Three White male authors were early allies of intersectionality: Hale (2006), Boellstorff (2007), and Valentine (2007). Hale (2023) championed intersectionality as essential in his engaged research with Indigenous groups in Central America, and he revisited this argument in an unpublished presentation. Boellstorff and Valentine brought intersectionality into their work on, respectively, queer anthropology and transgender politics. Indigenous feminist activist Speed (2008) included discussion of intersectionality in a chapter of her book on Indigenous rights in Chiapas. These ten works constitute the totality of intersectionality’s first decade in sociocultural anthropology, 2000–2009 (

Table 1. Intersectionality sources by year.

2000–2009	2010–2019	2020–2022 (Partial Decade)
McClaurin (2001a)	Inhorn and Wentzell (2012a); Inhorn and Wentzell (2012b); Lavie (2012); Martin (2012); McGlotten (2012); Parker (2012)	Burraway (2020); Kasnitz (2020) Lambert-Pennington and Pender (2020); Lanz et al. (2020); Leighton (2020); McClure (2020); Merriman (2020); Perry (2020); Van Meilj (2020)
Mullings (2005)	Craven & Davis (2013b); Marzullo (2013); Hogan et al. (2013)	Allen (2021), Barnes (2021); Becker (2021); Campbell (2021); Covington-Ward (2021); Henrici and Ju (2021); Hernández-Castillo (2021); Nahar (2021); Ravindran (2021); Shell-Duncan et al. (2021); Sierra (2021); Smith and Garrett-Scott (2021); Speed (2021); Stephen (2021); Speed and Stephen (2021); Thompson (2021b); Vaughn et al. (2021); Vega (2021); Vega and Maya (2021); Nimatuj (2021); Valdez (2021)
Hale (2006); Morgen (2006); Mullings and Schulz (2006); Mwaria (2006)	Caldwell (2016); Perry (2016); Wolputte (2016); Vega (2016)	Bonfanti (2022); Homewood et al. (2022); Powell et al. (2022); Sangaramoorthy and Benton (2022); Shell-Duncan (2022); Vega (2022)
Boellstorff (2007); Caldwell (2007); Valentine (2007)	Brenman et al. (2017); Caldwell (2017); Chadwick (2017); Challinor (2017); Erickson (2017); Henderson and Louis (2017); Johnson (2017); Kellett and Gnauck (2017); Martinez-Hume et al. (2017); Powell et al. (2017); Sangaramoorthy et al. (2017); Thomas and DeCaro (2017); Zavella (2017)
Speed (2008)	Chadwick (2018); Hogan et al. (2018); Lukose (2018); Muehlmann (2018); Radke (2018); Williams (2018)
	Lyon (2019); Mariner (2019); Pullum (2019); Shenton (2019); Speed (2019); Van Vleet (2019)

).13 Sociocultural anthropologists’ welcome party for intersectionality was modestly attended.

The second decade, 2010–2019, produced 38 publications, more than triple the number in the first decade. The year 2017, for unknown reasons, marks a surge in publications, 17 in a single year, which is half the total for the entire decade. The third decade is proving, so far, to continue intersectionality’s strong upward trend in numbers of publications. Its first three years (2020, 2021, 2022) produced 37 publications, with a peak in 2021 of 21 publications.

Publisher prestige: This aspect of intersectionality’s travelogue offers suggestive insights about where intersectionality traveled by looking at its publishers. The findings may reflect publishers’ reluctance or openness to ally with intersectionality or authors’ agency in seeking out more welcoming publishers.

Most of the book publishers are university presses. Overall, the status of publishers of explicitly intersectional books has been a mix of middle-prestige and higher-prestige houses, and this pattern holds steady across the decades. In the first decade, of the three books published, two are higher prestige publishers—Valentine’s (2007) with Duke University Press and Speed’s (2008) with Stanford University Press; while Caldwell’s (2007) book had a middle-prestige publisher: Rutgers University is Press. In the second decade, publishers include the University of Illinois Press (Caldwell, 2017; Van Vleet, 2019), Routledge (Chadwick, 2018), Duke University Press (Williams, 2018), University of California Press (Mariner, 2019), and University of North Carolina Press (Speed, 2019). The third decade brought books published by Routledge (Nahar, 2021), the University of Arizona Press (Stephen & Speed, 2021), the University of Texas Press (Vega, 2021), Duke University Press (Allen, 2021), and the University of California Press (Valdez, 2021). Duke University has published the most books: three. The University of California Press and Routledge have both published two books. Whether an artefact of my incomplete search, authorial choice, or publishers’ preference, several high-prestige university presses appear not to be venues for sociocultural anthropology research that takes an intersectional perspective.

Journals are also a mix of middle status and higher status, but again with notable absences in the latter. Consider first the journals that have published the most articles informed by intersectionality. Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, tops the list.14 Its six articles span the three decades with half in the third decade (Mullings, 2005; McGlotten, 2012; Henderson & Louis, 2017; Merriman, 2020; Covington-Ward, 2021; Barnes, 2021). The American Anthropologist and the Annual Review of Anthropology place next with three articles. Five journals have published two articles in the collection, and of these, one is a prestigious non-U.S. journal, Anthropology Southern Africa. The other four are more specialized, with a regional or topical focus such as medical anthropology. Next consider the number of intersectionality articles in relation to journal prestige from another angle, that of the five arguably most prestigious journals: the Annual Review of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and American Ethnologist.15 The American Anthropologist and the Annual Review, with three articles each, are in the lead; in the former, Leighton, 2020; Perry, 2020; Velásquez Estrada, 2022; in the latter, Boellstorff, 2007; Muehlmann, 2018; Vaughn et al., 2021. The three articles in the American Anthropologist all appeared in the third decade, while those in the Annual Review are spread across each decade. Two of the five journals have published only one article: American Ethnologist (Lavie, 2012) and Current Anthropology (Kasnitz, 2020). The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute has not published a single article. Clearly, intersectionality research has a minor presence in the most prestigious journals, whether because of editorial leanings or authorial choice. But if the American Anthropologist can be taken as a sign for the future, intersectionality may be gaining a presence in the journal Whitestream.

Authors’ positionality: The origins of intersectionality theory in the lived experiences of Black women prompts consideration of the extent to which sociocultural anthropologists who share this identity or other marginalized positionalities are more likely to adopt intersectionality and use it strongly. Information on authors’ identity (gender, race/ethnicity, age, class status), however, is fragmentary, found in occasional reflexive comments in a publication, on a website, or in a taped presentation.

Starting with the earliest intersectionality publications in sociocultural anthropology, Black women authors have been over-represented compared to their numbers in the general population of sociocultural anthropologists. Indigenous American feminists are also prominent contributors, and their numbers in the collection have risen in later years. Leading this effort is Speed, who has authored or co-authored the most publications in the collection (four), spanning the three decades starting with her 2005 ethnography through to her 2021 volume co-edited with Stephen. The percentage of White-authored works in the collection has also grown since the first decade when they were in the minority.

Determining other aspects of authors’ positionality is equally fraught with uncertainty. It seems safe to say that most authors, across the three decades, are female. Authors with known non-binary identification are rare, as are male authors of color and differently abled authors. In terms of class, all authors at the time of publication were employed, either in academia or a research institute or similar. Using the authors’ academic position as a rough proxy for age, authors with faculty appointments are generally at the associate or full levels rather than being assistant professors at the beginning of their career. This finding may indicate that researchers with tenured, secure appointments are more willing to incur possible risks to their academic standing by allying with a radical theory. Authors with academic appointments teach at institutions mainly in the middle- and upper-status range, with few authors at the highest-ranking institutions. In the U.S., some examples of authors at the highest-status universities are Allen at Columbia, Hale and Shannon Speed at UCLA, Inhorn at Yale, Martin at Princeton, and Smith at the University of Texas at Austin. Of these six, three are White, two are Black, and one is Indigenous.

Intersectionality’s travels to sociocultural anthropology started slowly but have gained momentum. Black sociocultural anthropologists have maintained a strong presence in all three decades and are increasingly joined by other anthropologists of color, including a notable presence of Indigenous Americans. Throughout the three decades, sources in the collection have appeared in a mix of middle-status and upper-status publications. Intersectionality appears to remain unevenly welcomed by some of the most prestigious book publishers and journals. Sociocultural anthropologists who publish about intersectionality mainly have tenured academic appointments, with a small number teaching at the highest-prestige universities.

5. Deradicalization with Travel to Sociocultural Anthropology?

Traveling theory’s question concerns the possible weakening of a radical theory as it moves from its originating context through time and space, including intellectual space. To examine the possible deradicalization of intersectionality, I review authors’ commitment to intersectionality’s original goals and ethos from three angles: citing and integrating the canonical literature; using the word intersectionality or closely related terms in the title, subtitle, abstract, or keywords; and the issues addressed.

5.1. Say Their Names

Most publications in the collection cite at least one of the classic sources. By far, the most frequently cited canonical author is Crenshaw, with over 50 sources referencing her work. Collins’ publications, including her co-authored book (Collins & Bilge, 2016/2020), comes next in terms of frequency with nearly 40 sources citing her publications. Scattered references to the Combahee River Collective Statement, Davis, hooks, and Lorde also appear. The only frequently cited sociocultural anthropologist is Mullings, whose several publications, including some that do not use intersectionality explicitly, are cited by fewer than 10 authors. Crenshaw’s (1991) article alone was cited over 20 times, more than twice that number, demonstrating Crenshaw’s monumental influence in shaping intersectionality studies in sociocultural anthropology. I consider the strongest sources those that cite three or more canonical sources and use them to frame and inform their study. Twelve authors most clearly meet these criteria: Speed (2019), Mullings (2005), Caldwell (2007, 2017), Chadwick (2017, 2018), Johnson (2017), Mulla as co-author (Powell et al., 2017, 2022) Lukose (2018), Nimatuj (2021), Thompson (2021a, 2021b), Allen (2021), and Sangaramoorthy and Benton (2022). Most of these authors are anthropologists of color, and about half of their publications appeared in the third decade, attesting to the leading role of non-White anthropologists and intersectionality’s increasing strength over time. Geographically, most authors who strongly ally with intersectionality are U.S.-based, with only two located outside the U.S.: Rachelle Chadwick in South Africa and Thompson in Canada. Given the small number of authors living outside the U.S. (around 10), it is impossible to say if distance from the U.S. has a diluting effect, but publications by Thompson and Chadwick are suggestive evidence to the contrary.

5.2. Say the Words

Given the White Possession of much of anthropology, the sheer act of naming and allying with a Black-associated critical theory may be seen as a bold move. I take the use of the word intersectionality, or a closely related term, in the title of the publication, or secondarily the subtitle, as strong commitment. Of the 85 publications in the collection, only 13 include the words intersectionality, intersectional, or intersecting in the title or subtitle. Of these, only three use the noun, intersectionality, which signals to me the strongest affiliation. One was a journal article published during the first peak (Powell et al., 2017) and the other two in the last year of the collection: a chapter (Powell et al., 2022) and a journal article (Sangaramoorthy & Benton, 2022). All three titles place the word intersectionality first in the title, giving it prominence, unhesitatingly spotlighting it. Mulla, Sangaramoorthy, and Benton are all authors of color. Use of the adjective intersectional has also increased, appearing in phrases such as intersectional analysis (Morgen, 2006), intersectional approach (Watson et al., 2022), intersectional stigma (Sangaramoorthy et al., 2017), intersectional praxis (Zavella, 2017), intersectional ecologies (Vaughn et al., 2021), and intersectional justice (Velásquez Estrada, 2022).

Keywords as clues to the presence and vigor of intersectionality are tantalizing, but again, their analysis only allows for fuzzy generalizations. Complicating factors include the fact that not all journals include keywords, journals allow for varying numbers of keywords, and journal norms may affect the order of keywords. Nonetheless, over time, a rising trend is visible in the use of intersectionality and related terms with them appearing more frequently as keywords, often as the first keyword, especially after 2017.

5.3. Address the Issues

Every research-focused source addresses some aspect of inequality, marginality, and power, especially as affected by racial categories (including indigeneity) and most often intersecting with gender and sexuality. Authors consistently adhere to the canonical ethos, and they do so consistently over time and space. The most prominent topic is marginalization in health, especially reproductive health, health care access, afflictions such as HIV and AIDS, and the body. Newer, but related, topics highlight varieties of violence: incarceration (Speed, 2019; Hernández-Castillo, 2021), policing (Thompson, 2021a, 2021b), rape (Speed, 2019, 2021), racist genocide (Stephen & Speed, 2021), drug wars (Muehlmann, 2018), reproductive science and birthing as harm (Chadwick, 2018; Vega, 2021; Valdez, 2021), and the academic epistemic violence of citational practice (Smith & Garrett-Scott, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). While also detailing wrongs, studies address activist movements and rights-seeking with a trend toward using social justice language in later years. In all, topics in the collection have maintained focus on matters central to classic intersectionality theory but have also moved them into expanded domains often using strengthened language. In the words of Carbado et al. (2013), if intersectionality is “what it does”, then it is, as of 2023, increasingly alive and vigorous in sociocultural anthropology.

A last example of a new direction that strengthens intersectionality in sociocultural anthropology is authored by two sociocultural anthropologists of color, Sangaramoorthy and Benton (2022), and exemplifies stewardship of intersectionality in sociocultural anthropology. Stewardship involves respectful care, in this case of a concept, to sustain it for the future (Hancock, 2016, pp. 21–22). Sangaramoorthy and Benton defend intersectionality’s explanatory power against attempts by public health experts to integrate syndemic theory with intersectionality.16 Sangaramoorthy and Benton argue against such a merging of the two perspectives because syndemics is a more limited approach and adds nothing to the analytical power of intersectionality. Further, merging the two acts to lessen intersectionality’s value, reducing it to a subservient role. This example of stewardship from the third decade may be an indication of more such work to come.

6. The Intersectionality Generation: Small but Strong

Intersectionality’s origin story began with a speech delivered in 1851 by a formerly enslaved Black woman who pointed to a flaw in the abolitionist movement of the time: while fighting for women’s rights and Black men’s rights, it ignored Black women who were thereby framed out by the prevailing logics of recognition, placed in a position of double jeopardy on account of their race and gender. Over the decades, a starred history of Black feminist thinkers and advocates advanced understanding of how oppression and discrimination erase or stigmatize people. Early on, race and gender were the primary focus, but they were later joined by class, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and more. In 1989, legal scholar and Black feminist activist Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to capture the multiplicative jeopardy of double, triple, and even more, disadvantages. Decades later, intersectionality theory continues to gain visibility in many areas: academic and professional, theoretical and activist. This section explores why intersectionality is still marginalized in sociocultural anthropology, whether a radical theory is deradicalized by moving beyond its original context, and last, a thought about the future.

Strong but Mainly Outside the Mainstream

Intersectionality’s travelogue to sociocultural anthropology started with a modest welcome. Since its second decade, it has gained substantial strength but nonetheless remains largely outside the high-prestige mainstream. Two characteristics of sociocultural anthropology provide significant barriers: anthropology as a White Possessive and anthropology as an anti-politics machine.17

Sociocultural anthropology as a White Possessive, also known by the hashtag #AnthroSoWhite (Ralph, 2019),18 and as White public space (Brodkin et al., 2011), is inherently resistant to intersectionality theory. Its origins in and continued association with Black feminism are contrary to the White Possessive. Higher education, the site of the reproduction of sociocultural anthropology, perpetuates the White Possessive through formal practices including faculty hiring (Schuller & Abreu, 2023), student admissions, curriculum, library holdings, and administrative leadership. For people of color, entering and existing in White public space can be challenging, enraging, and traumatizing (Watego, 2021).

Given this article’s focus on publications, it makes sense to ask how academic publishing perpetuates the White Possession, specifically through citational politics. Black feminist anthropologist Bolles, building on an earlier gender analysis of article citational practices (Lutz, 1990), advanced understanding of sexist citational politics by including race (2013). Bolles analyzed citations of Black women anthropologists and found 151, of which 40 percent were to only two authors: Harrison and Smedley. Most authors citing Black women authors were Black anthropologists (p. 67). Bolles thus added an intersectional dimension to understanding the epistemic segregation within sociocultural anthropology, revealing the double jeopardy Black women anthropologists face. Smith and Garrett-Scott (2021) reviewed citation rates of articles by Black women in top-tier anthropology journals and found “…a significant and disturbing trend: Black women anthropologists are scarcely cited in relative comparison to our absolute numbers in the field…” (p. 20). These findings prompted Smith’s critical praxis and the formation of the Cite Black Women Collective (Smith et al., 2021).19 Its goal is to counter the pervasive and persistent erasure of Black women scholars within and beyond sociocultural anthropology. Citational racism and epistemic segregation are thus well documented in sociocultural anthropology, and they plausibly played a role in the modest welcome of intersectionality theory and its continued marginalization. Intersectionality theory, a form of critical theory, is explicitly political and oppositional to the classic and still firmly held objectivism of traditional sociocultural anthropology. It has thus had to face what has been called an anti-politics machine within the discipline, which claims to occupy a depoliticized zone. (Ferguson, 1984). Objectivism’s signification, to its supporters, is Western scientific credibility. It has shaped sociocultural anthropology research and teaching since its beginnings, promoting the study of noncontroversial topics, the researcher’s emotional distance from the study population, and the extractive pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Traditional sociocultural anthropology defines as bad science collaborative, community-partnered research methods and commitment to using findings to benefit the community. Mainstream book publishers and high-prestige journals, seeking to retain their status, are more likely to reject proposals and manuscripts that carry the supposed taint of political engagement. Authors avoid citing such tainted authors. Faculty hiring and promotions to tenure are heavily based on the status of a candidate’s publications, so it is unsurprising that authors of the publications in this study are mainly in tenured academic or otherwise secure positions. This, mentors may steer doctoral students away from radical theories, choice of controversial research topics, and fieldwork methods that involve being engaged with the research population and their interests and struggles (Bourgois, 1990; Loperena, 2016). The mainstream maintains its myth of a depoliticized sociocultural anthropology (Bourgois, 1990).

While the barriers to intersectionality in traditional sociocultural anthropology are high, they are not insuperable. The 85 sources that inform this article attest to the growth of interest in intersectionality in sociocultural anthropology and a modest movement into mainstream journals.20 Said’s question, however, is still valid: along with growth in numbers of allies, has intersectionality’s mission been appropriated, neoliberalized, and defanged? This review offers no indication of that happening in sociocultural anthropology. Strongly intersectional sources are found in all three decades along with a continuing presence of less strongly intersectional sources. Many publications dating from 2017 and onward have the strongest voices. Recalling Allen and Jobson’s (2016) description of the decolonizing generation in sociocultural anthropology, the story of intersectionality in sociocultural anthropology can also be told in generational terms. In the case of intersectionality, the original ionizing context was a combination of racism and sexism in the U.S. Nearly two hundred years after intersectionality’s origin story began, racism and sexism still exist along with intersectional inequalities worldwide. While crises, such as the Trump presidency and the heightened system of violent policing, attract the attention of scholars and activists, invidious social oppression and exclusion are a constant, and thus intersectionality continues to be essential to understanding and addressing social injustice. Can this work be achieved without an intersectional lens, without reading the canon, and saying the words? Yes, but adopting intersectionality and recognition of its roots in Black women’s oppression and suffering add a finer edge, a more focused purpose and commitment. Intersectionality addresses meaningful issues in a politically transparent way, follows ethical research practices, and embraces praxis, either direct or indirect. It insists on a sociocultural anthropology that is more than just knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Its critique of elitism, objectivism, and extractivism, and its creation as a tool from outside the master’s house promise a way to build a different, socially just sociocultural anthropology.

A crucial step to ensure intersectionality’s continued vigorous future in sociocultural anthropology publishing remains to be taken. Said (2000, p. 452), in discussing traveling theory, wrote: “To speak here only of borrowing and adaptation is not adequate. There is in particular an intellectual, and perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word…”. Theory, thus, has more than just intellectual value. It has a social life, creating shared identity, recognition, and mutual support. This study reveals that many dozens of sociocultural anthropologists are allied with intersectionality. But what evidence exists of a moral community among sociocultural anthropologists who ally with intersectionality? In terms of publications, not so much, especially in the earlier decades. The increasing number of co-authored publications and and co-editorships, however, portends a future headed in the right direction. Said would perhaps agree that there is an emerging “affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word”. And in affiliation lies strength.