Intersectionality, Sex/Gender Entanglement, and Research Design
摘要
Intersectionality is a theoretical framework emerging from US Black, Chicana, and Indigenous feminisms that considers the interlocking nature of processes of oppression across sex/gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, and other social positions. While not originating in applications to research methodology, its core ideas are apparent in Black feminist sociological, legal, and other forms of scholarship even prior to the emergence of the word intersectionality nearly 35 years ago. Since that time, social scientists have provided thinking tools with which to better incorporate intersectional thinking. These include Patricia Hill Collins’s ideas of relationality through the addition of categories of diference, such as adding race and ethnicity to sex and gender, and Leslie McCall’s diferentiation between anti-, intra-, and intercategorical approaches to intersectional complexity. Given intersectionality’s core foci on social power, inequity, and social context, what happens when we add intersectionality into the feld of sex/gender complexity and entanglement is explored, along with its meaning for research methods. In doing so, a new concept of intersectional entanglement is developed and explored, rooted in Collins’s ideas of relationality and embodied through a wide range of biopsychosocial processes. Some research design considerations and questions for sex and gender scholars in the context of intersectional entanglement are outlined.