Intersectionality's Challenge to Identity Politics

In response to the pluralist logic regarding the democratic guarantee provided by cross-cutting political cleavages, both activists and scholars have long noted that different citizens fare differently based on certain aspects of their presumably inalterable identities. Due to common experiences such as institutionalized discrimination, legalized marginalization, or sociopolitically sanctioned violence, political actors who shared the same racial, gender, or class identity logically envisioned these shared experiences as a basis for collective politics. Put most succinctly, the foundational argument for this collective political action now known as identity politics states “before a group can enter the open society, it must close ranks.”⁶

These analyses depend on a logic of “group solidarity” that has traditionally been interpreted to equate group unity with group uniformity. For standard identity politics supporters, a unitary category serves to bind people into a political group based on a uniform set of experiences, as the replies to questions 1, 2, and 4 of table 1 imply.

This logic has inspired theorists and political actors alike in their quest to unite people across local or international boundaries. Both modern civil rights movement activists and theorists across the ideological spectrum have identified and claimed political bonds based on a shared yet permeable set of experiences for people of African descent throughout the world. Upon recognition of these experiences, “closing ranks” would logically occur, producing collective efforts across national boundaries for political change. Similarly, activists and theorists of the more recent “indigenismo” movements throughout the Americas have linked the political efforts of groups the U.S. government identifies as different—Native American and Latino—with the efforts of indigenous populations in Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, among other countries. Importantly, some of these international lines of communication were forged by women, continuing a tradition with over a century of history.⁷

During the nineteenth century, women suffragists and policy advocates in the United States met and consulted with their counterparts in Britain and much of western Europe.⁸

Both this wave of women's organizing and the second, more racially diverse wave of international feminist organizing in the latter half of the twentieth century were premised upon the same identity-politics logic articulated by racial/ethnic politics scholars noted above. Maternalist arguments of the nineteenth century argued for women's unique perspective based on their presumably shared character traits.⁹ Academic members of the second wave of the U.S. women's movement continued this logic across ideological and disciplinary boundaries. Presumably shared character traits were considered “natural impulses” by some, suggesting a political response that revalues what was previously devalued. Others pointed to such character traits as socially constructed phenomena that were imposed upon women, suggesting a completely different political response.¹⁰ Yet none of these scholars fundamentally questioned the a priori assumption of shared experiences that undergirded a belief in the necessity and possibility of a collective response.

Though the above review is in no way intended to be exhaustive, the identity politics logic to unite people sharing at least one common politically salient identity is clear. Several refinements to this logic have emerged as different political movements have varied in their ability to leverage it for political change.¹¹

Nevertheless groups are still considered able to advocate a specific set of policy proposals based on a pre-existing presumption of shared political goals.¹²

From the normative point of view, intersectionality has emerged as a compelling critique of this group unity equals group uniformity logic. Most frequently, scholars have focused on the material effects of in-group essentialism, which occurs when a sub-set of a group's populations (e.g. elites) seeks to fix the characteristics of a specific identity such as race or gender, marginalizing those group members who differ in other aspects of their identity (e.g., their class or sexual orientation).¹³

Such material effects have included the enforced silence of sub-group members in an effort to present a united front, the miscalculation among marginalized group elites regarding the penetration of certain policy benefits to the least advantaged members of the group, and the actual loss of life, family, fortune or freedom such an assumption costs marginalized members of these groups. In response to the entreaty to place one identity ahead of another simultaneously held identity for political expediency's sake, current intersectionality proponents have argued that one cannot privilege a single aspect of one's identity to the detriment of another, just as Goldman did in her day. The answers to questions one and two of table 1 derive from this normative response to the logic of unitary identity politics. Most intersectionality scholars share the logic that multiple marginalizations of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation at the individual and institutional levels create social and political stratification, requiring policy solutions that are attuned to the interactions of these categories. Intersectionality theory claims that these policy problems are more than the sum of mutually exclusive parts; they create an interlocking prison from which there is little escape.

These normative claims raise a number of questions regarding the way in which public policy and social movements are now studied in relation to each other. Traditional analyses of public policy decision-making have focused on what is at stake. Early legislative analyses introduced individual legislator goals into the equation such as reelection and personal ideology. Access to federal funding, feasibility of implementation, policy agendas, and public opinion all influence legislators as they make decisions about how to alter public policy. More recently, findings across policy domains have demonstrated that who is at issue matters just as much as what is at stake. Several scholars have focused on introducing the social construction of target populations process into models of policy design.¹⁴

These social constructions of target populations are based upon stereotypes about particular groups from politics, culture, the media, and history, among other influences.

The inclusion of how policy target populations are construed by legislative decision makers owes some of the force of its argument to parallel lines of research that have chronicled the influence of racism or sexism in American political culture. Such studies have proceeded at the individual level as well as at the institutional level.¹⁵

Both research traditions have been shaped by the collective efforts of marginalized groups—racial/ethnic minorities on the one hand, women on the other—to force governments like that of the United States to live up to what it wrote in its founding documents. The work of social movements such as the modern civil rights movement in the United States as well as the first and second waves of the women's movement both domestically and abroad have in many ways produced public policy that is somewhat responsive to individual and institutional discrimination.

Intersectional work goes deeper to examine the limits of policy-making designed to assist target populations who should theoretically benefit from either racially-targeted or gender-targeted public policy but in reality benefit from neither. For example, who has the authority to define public policy goals that are in the interests of race or gender groups? How might we account for the wide variations in either political resources or political outcomes within race or gender groups? Instead of designing policies that create a talented tenth or a fortunate fifth of a marginalized group, how might we redesign domestic and foreign policies to ensure that all members of any marginalized group are enabled to empower themselves?

In positing interconnecting relationships between race, gender, class, and often sexual orientation, scholars have continued to note an imbalance between the plethora of theoretical studies and the relative paucity of empirical work in intersectionality.¹⁶

One primary reason for this disparity is the conflation of two different theoretical approaches that are assumed to follow from the challenges to static definitions of race, class, and gender categories. As noted by the questions in the previous paragraph, intersectionality theory to date has emphasized intra-category diversity—that is, the tremendous variation within categories such as “Blackness” or “womanhood.” This assertion has been conflated with postmodern and poststructuralist critiques of modern western philosophy and history, which question the existence of such categories at all. Intersectionality argues for new conceptualizations of categories and their role in politics, rather than seeking an abolition of categories themselves.¹⁷

Even without this conflation, however, empirical researchers find themselves stymied in the pursuit of research questions that dictate some categorization strategy, however contingently conceptualized. The powerful reply that all categories can be fractured into ever-exponentially increasing sub-categories once intersectionality is addressed empirically has led to a rejection of intersectionality by a number of variable-oriented researchers who envision a paralysis emerging from the inclusion of increasing numbers of variables. The rule of parsimony, so the argument goes, would be violated with little to no gain in explanatory power for political problems such as persistent poverty or discrimination. This logic has largely gone unchallenged, leading many empirical political scientists to envision intersectionality solely as a set of untestable normative claims rather than as a research paradigm which not only answers questions left unanswered in policy design but also generates testable hypotheses.

To date, most empirical intersectionality research has emphasized case studies of varying sizes and demographic populations, leading to the common assumption that intersectionality is a content area focusing solely on “mere description.” Case studies chronicling or comparing the political experiences of Black, Latino, Native American, or Asian American women of different class, sexual orientation, or national origin have generated critically important knowledge essential for testing time-worn theories such as the gender gap, pluralist models of democracy, approaches to peacemaking, sustainable development, and international law on refugees. As intersectionality scholars have sought to overcome the obstacles pointed out by parsimony-conscious empiricists, they have emphasized one or another intersectional group, examining relative differences and similarities using a multi-method approach. Yet to move beyond testing time-worn theories, to examine the as-yet unanswered questions intersectionality generates, intersectional empiricists cannot rely on the same old data, or more precisely, data collected in the same old unitary way.

Quantitative scholars have used variable-oriented surveys not explicitly designed to capture the qualitative within-group diversity posited by intersectionality theorists. This practice corresponds to the assumptions of the multiple approach regarding the number of categories addressed and their relative importance in the model (assumptions shared, of course, with the intersectional approach), yet the data at the heart of these analyses remains multiple as we answer questions three and four of table 1: they are static, snapshot data for the most part, with two critical assumptions: uniformity within multiplicative categories like “black women” and within-case independence of categories like race and gender. Most of this data further reverts to the unitary approach regarding question five: the analyses are aggregated across individuals without concomitant institutional components featured in the multiple and intersectional approaches.

Any empirical analysis is only as good as the data collected prior to it. My claim is not that intersectionality scholars should eschew rich datasets with thousands of data points in favor of traditional ethnography or participant observation. Instead, I argue that continuing to collect data in the same way helps us assimilate into the old questions generated by old paradigms regardless of their ongoing utility at the cost of answering the pesky new questions unanswerable by the old approaches.

Yet this challenge is not insurmountable. We can collect data in a manner that acknowledges contingency and enables quantitative empirical work using fuzzy-set theory. In the final sections of this article I argue that fuzzy-set logic, which has been part of our daily lives for over forty years through the design of automobiles and airplanes, provides important resources for empirically-oriented intersectionality scholars.¹⁸

However, a clear articulation of the three approaches to research on categories like race, gender, and class must precede an examination of how to collect intersectional data and design intersectional research.

Historically approaches to the incorporation of the fundamental insight that race (and I would argue, gender, class, ethnicity and/or sexual orientation) matters more frequently than not in many analyses of politics has produced three significant shifts in the way political scientists have addressed (or have avoided addressing) these political cleavages, identities, categories of difference, or variables, as they might be called depending on one's own ontological position in the discipline.¹⁹

I seek to examine these transitions from political science research that examines or privileges a single category of sociopolitical difference (e.g., race or gender) to work that examines multiple categories of sociopolitical difference as isolated phenomena (e.g., race and gender) to, most recently, work that examines intersecting categories of sociopolitical difference (e.g., race interacts with gender). As I noted earlier, the typology of these shifts emerges from answers to six questions regarding research across subfields of political science that examines issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation.²⁰

Transitions in the Study of Categories of Difference

Table 1 demonstrates the distinctions among the three strands of race, gender, and class-oriented research. I call the first strand the unitary approach, because of its presumed emphasis on a single category of identity or difference or political tradition as the most relevant or most explanatory. Research and political movements emphasizing gender, class, or race proceeded on parallel tracks for a long period despite efforts among some political actors to bring the tracks together.

The second strand of research is called the multiple approach because it recognizes a priori the role of several categories, such as race and gender or race and class as equally important yet conceptually independent considerations when examining political phenomena. For example, African American activists in labor movements struggled at length within their groups to gain recognition of the equal constitutive power of race and economic class in the United States as well as around the world.

The final strand of research is called the intersectional approach because it not only recognizes the political significance of one or another category (like the unitary approach), but it also sees more than one category's explanatory power in examining political institutions or political actors (like the multiple approach). The intersectional approach moves beyond the multiple approach in several theoretically important ways. First, it changes the relationship between the categories of investigation from one that is determined a priori to one of empirical investigation. This is an important shift for large-n quantitative studies in particular, which tend to assume that race operates identically across entire cities, states, and nations when placed in interaction with gender or class.

Second, intersectionality posits an interactive, mutually constitutive relationship among these categories and the way in which race (or ethnicity) and gender (or other relevant categories) play a role in the shaping of political institutions, political actors, the relationships between institutions and actors, and the relevant categories themselves. Much work in this area has emerged from work in international law—specifically international human rights research regarding women's political participation in developing societies.

Research on international development and empowerment has found that North-South relationships among international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, state institutions, and civil society, even when sharing a commitment to enhancing women's rights, must contend with ethnic and cultural differences that can thwart even the best intentions in research, development programs, and politics.²¹

In particular, many northern women scholars, activists, and practitioners have previously characterized non-Western women as static, primitive beings who lack agency or knowledge.²² This has created an opportunity for local elite framing of women's development and empowerment programs as flash points sparking anti-western sentiment in many parts of Africa.²³ Moreover, this social construction of African women violates the intersectional responses to questions three and four of table 1: it fails to acknowledge the negotiation routinely engaged in by women involved in an anti-patriarchal project and a diversity of African women on the continent as regards class, religion, and ethnic origin. The critical contributions of indigenous feminisms in the African context have problematized the terms of western feminist theory, proceeding in much the same way as intersectionality did in the United States: through a stage involving “specialist” oriented, practical case studies within the development and nation-building projects of post-colonial African nations.

There is a great deal of slippage in the literature among the terms multiple identities (or traditions), multiplicative identities (or traditions), and intersecting identities (or traditions). The next two sections distinguish between the multiple and intersectional approaches. I turn to a discussion of education policy to demonstrate the crucial role intersecting categories of race, gender, and class might play and the ways in which new questions are generated for this policy domain. Derrick Bell's recent Silent Covenants illuminates the policy pitfalls of the unitary and multiple approaches.

Earlier Approaches: The Unitary and Multiple Strands of Research

In some ways the unitary approach emerges most intuitively out of a political science tradition that valorizes Lockean Liberalism. In a situation of categorical marginalization, such as apartheid South Africa or the ante-bellum United States, strong arguments were made for the aforementioned “closing ranks” strategy. The normative arguments for natural rights and a social contract between rulers and the governed are clearly violated by slavery, apartheid, or the formal exclusion of women from political life. In addition to its emphasis on a single category, the unitary approach is also a universalizing approach—it considers one category as most salient for political explanation. One explanation fits all members of the group uniformly, and one explanation is considered the most important over time. In this approach, the thought that class or race might have an impact on gender is more a factor of the wily nature of patriarchy than an open theoretical or empirical question. Thus in the unitary approach, one category reigns paramount among others and is therefore justifiably the sole lens of analysis. While this approach might seem outdated, it still appears in the literature, often with a caveat justifying its exclusive focus.²⁴

Within these earlier approaches categories are usually conceptualized as static and enduring. Empirically, this may include the use of data with government-mandated categories or the aforementioned survey data. Beyond the empirical challenges of unitary cross-sectional analysis for practical application, because the categories are assumed to be static, the unitary approach assumes that an individual's memberships are permanent, when in fact they can shift due to institutional policy changes. Much of the political firestorm over the possibility of adding a multiracial category to the census involves the fear among Black and Latino elites that their communities' numbers and subsequently their resource allocation would decline because migration from these two categories was predicted to be larger than migration from the White/Caucasian category. While this fear seems irrational to many in the multiracial movement, anecdotal evidence of Dred Scott in the 1860s and Susie Phipps in the 1970s, as well as the arguments of critical race theorists regarding the political economic value of white category membership gives many elites pause.²⁵

Categorical boundaries so carefully drawn and rigidly enforced for over two centuries in the United States create two problematic outcomes. First, groups at the bottom of the hierarchy compete rather than cooperate in a winner-takes-all system. Claims that race equality or gender equality represent a single magic bullet have facilitated an “Oppression Olympics,” where groups compete for the mantle of “most oppressed” to gain the attention and political support of dominant groups as they pursue policy remedies, leaving the overall system of stratification unchanged.²⁶

Second, the categories themselves elide important differences within groups—leaving groups with an ongoing hierarchy within. The assumption of static, uniform, categories presents a serious problem for education policy scholars. For example, the needs of Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese American children in the U.S. public schools are often ignored and overlooked as they are presumed to fall under the “model minority” stereotype of East Asian Americans whose ancestors came from China, Japan, and Korea. These within-group differences trump between racial group differences as predictors of student academic performance, drop-out rates, and family resources available in making a child “ready for school.”²⁷

A similar process operating in reverse occurs among students of recent Caribbean and African descent who attempt to set themselves apart from African American students who are stereotyped to eschew strong academic performance as “acting white.”²⁸

Beyond the Magic Bullet to Yin and Yang: Intersectional Approaches

Intersectionality, as a body of research, is concerned even in its theoretical voice about the practical implications of its arguments. While intersectionality is by no means unique in its attention to applications, the ways in which it conceptualizes the constitution of, relationship between, and multi-level analysis of categories of difference is in fact unique. In this sense intersectionality as an approach to conducting research answers questions left unanswered by the unitary and multiple approaches.

A large proportion of intersectional research is dependent upon the seminal articles of critical race feminists who forcefully outline the ramifications of a legal system mired in the unitary approach for women of color who are victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and employment discrimination.⁴⁸

To prove racial discrimination, claimants must demonstrate that the policy has a disparate impact on men and women of the racial group. To prove gender discrimination, claimants must demonstrate the policy's disparate impact on women across racial groups. Because claimants cannot argue that a particular policy targets women of color disparately (without including men of color or white women in the claim), they are denied equal protection of the law. These issues are more than abstract conjecture; failure to attend to cultural differences and differential status for Latinas has had a dangerous impact on the provision of local police protection for domestic violence victims.

In order to avoid the conclusion that intersectionality is simply a body of research concerning women of color, another example in which within-category difference has politically relevant ramifications focuses neither on women of color nor the American context. The answer to the question raised in the introduction, “who has the authority to define public policy goals that are in the interests of race or gender groups” is addressed implicitly by the answers to questions three, four and five of table 1. It is perhaps the most familiar normative argument of intersectionality scholars.

Instead of race or gender as dividing lines, the role of elite framing and manipulation of language can exemplify the significance of within-category diversity, dynamic interaction between institutions and individuals, and multiple levels of analysis. The linguistic association of one group with all the power and a subordinate group with little to no power can help facilitate an ongoing or episodic cycle of intergroup conflict. Some of the most tragic aspects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide are traced to the social constructions of Hutu and Tutsi identities as proxies for other intersecting phenomena (such as economic class stratification) at the individual and institutional levels despite their common language, genetic heritage, and kinship networks.⁴⁹

The setting of a policy, even one as nefarious as genocide, is necessarily based upon what the perceived needs of the relevant group are. That list of needs is usually constructed based on generalizations of who the group is and their relevant norms and behaviors. Intersectional research reveals and challenges the efficacy of these generalizations.

The intersectional approach has been partially implemented in the public policy literature through the specific domains of AIDS and welfare policy. What would a comprehensive intersectional approach to education policy look like? Returning to Silent Covenants, I proceed through the six dimensions of the intersectional approach in outlining research strategies that would satisfy Bell's desired policy outcome—equal, effective education for all students regardless of their race or ethnicity.

Intersectionality first recognizes that designing successful race-conscious education policy requires a comprehensive diagnosis of the problem. Thus an intersectional approach would first claim that race is not the only category of difference at work in producing unequal outcomes among racial/ethnic groups. This position answers question one in table 1.

Before moving on to question two, there is the essential matter of data collection. How will we measure the four categories the review of Silent Covenants revealed to be minimally required for educational policy analysis? Due to resource limitations, most intersectionality researchers have used pre-existing datasets, collected without attention to the relevant features of intersectionality theory. In this hypothetical design, we can briefly articulate a different approach to data collection and measurement.

Fuzzy-set logic can best capture the within-group diversity at stake among categories of race, class, gender, and region already deemed relevant in the previous section.⁵⁰

Using fuzzy-set theory allows a scholar to attend to the issue of within-group diversity in each category in a manner that is substantively and theoretically consistent with the claims of intersectionality. The first two categories provide divergent examples of data collection. Applying fuzzy-set logic can move us beyond nominal measures of a socially-constructed category like race in two different ways.

If a researcher wants to capture the increasing heterogeneity of people living in the United States, relying solely on census data or self-reported identification, especially when constructed as a single survey question, does not fulfill the demands of intersectional research. As noted in table 1, individual and structural factors shape the group boundaries of a specific racial/ethnic group. Several questions tapping the four dimensions of the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI) may capture individual-level perceptions of racial identity. Yet contextual factors such as the racial composition of a neighborhood and school (not simply their reports of these factors) must also be considered as preconditions for the racial salience and centrality aspects of the MMRI. Moreover, further contextual or institutional data may be relevant for political science, such as census category shifts, law enforcement-community relations or the legal status of undocumented immigrants in mixed households.

All of this data taps factors racial identity experts deem important in ascertaining the status of membership in a racial or ethnic category. A nuclear member would be a person fully in the set (value = 1), a modal member would be almost fully in the set (value = .75), a marginal member might represent the crossover point of being equally in and out of the set (value = .5), a dormant member be a person more out of than in the set (value = .25) and a non-member would be a person fully out of the racial group (value = 0). These values do not need to correspond exactly to genetic heritage—a biracial person is not automatically a .5 member of two racial groups. Rather, the investigator sets these cut points in qualitative terms first; a nuclear member is one whose identity is fully involved based on the evaluation of all relevant case data. Survey responses can be set as closed- or open-ended depending on the substantive literature and goals of the research. Questions can also be adjusted based on the extensive review of the policy literature at issue.

This intersectional approach to collecting data is grounded in fuzzy-set logic. There are two benefits of this approach. First, it acknowledges the extensive psychological literature on identity development, which argues not simply that categories are socially shaped, but that young individuals develop and navigate their identities in ongoing ways based on their family, school and neighborhood interactions at the individual and institutional levels.⁵¹

The cut points need not even correspond to being all, mostly, or not at all Black, Latino, Asian, white or Native American. The stages of racial identity development for various populations make qualitative rather than quantitative distinctions.

If a quantitative distinction is warranted, however, then this fuzzy-set logic is capable of attending to it, particularly regarding the issue of multiraciality. For example, blood quantum continues to be a controversial, government-imposed standard used for Native American tribal membership. In some cases it is a prerequisite for access to educational resources like tribal schools, colleges, or scholarships. Interpreting the cut points more quantitatively may be necessary for educational policy analyses in this regard, despite ongoing contestation of the standard.⁵²

Class is similarly a “fuzzy” concept, most often operationalized as self-reported income. Yet in terms of educational outcomes, other aspects of an individual's profile have been previously mentioned as relevant, including family resources beyond income. In particular, children who have parents with college degrees are more likely to consider college a viable option. Instead of merely using income as a proxy for class, an intersectional approach might define membership in a particular class based on replies to a series of questions that again reflect not simply quantitative differences but theoretically relevant qualitative differences.

Take, for example, a group most readers of this journal once belonged to: the set of graduate students. Graduate students can be defined, depending on with whom you speak, as “educated working poor”—making comparatively little money while in the process of acquiring the highest level of education available. Incorporating categorical intersection prior to data collection rather than post-data collection changes the information available for consideration in establishing comparison cases for analysis. Attending to intersectionality in collecting class data would first mean an expanded definition of socioeconomic class, as I have noted above.

Yet this action, while necessary, is not sufficient. Beyond the collection of additional data, accounting for causal complexity would include the attention to intersections of class and gender prior to data analysis. Given longstanding findings of an ongoing gendered division of labor in the home, it would certainly make sense to ask which parent is the graduate student. While the gendered household labor question is largely settled, a graduate student in most cases (male or female) has more flexible time to spend with a child than a blue- or white-collar co-parent. In other words, the relationship between the gender of the graduate student parent and time invested in socializing the child is an open empirical question (see table 1, question 2) that may vary based on a number of individual and institutional factors, including but not limited to the availability of affordable quality daycare (e.g., the University of North Carolina's University Child Care Center or Columbia University's Rita Gold Early Childcare Center) or education (e.g., UCLA's University Elementary School); the occupation of a spouse and the spouse's available time for child-rearing; the stage of the graduate student's studies (e.g., coursework, exams, submitting the dissertation). One could imagine a variety of combinations of these causal factors that could lead to a fuzzy-set of graduate student children with upper-middle class social capital available to them.

This example illuminates the role of time in such measures as well. Most graduate students are part of the educated working poor until they obtain their degree, when they become qualified for full-time white-collar work in or out of academe. A question about job status of the primary caretaker could serve as an important corrective to a simple numerical income reply. While graduate student poverty is almost always temporary, a lifetime migrant worker or a social-security dependent retiree's poverty is much more entrenched.

At this stage it may seem to conventional variable-oriented scholars that I am introducing variables that are highly correlated into the class construct. Importantly, I propose fuzzy-set logic as an effective strategy for handling causal complexity—causation that is both conjunctural and multiple.⁵³

In particular, causal complexity defined under this strategy avoids assuming that independent categories are necessary or sufficient for the outcome under study.⁵⁴

Causal complexity, a clear part of intersectional policy dilemmas, requires the relaxation of the simplifying assumption that each causal factor can be isolated from the next. The data collection process described here would require explicit theoretical and substantive justifications for each delineation of set membership. Rather than count mere genetic heritage, returning us to the dreaded one-drop rule, race is operationalized as a much more fluid, dynamic construct, as is class.

For the two types of geographical contexts discussed earlier, population density (urban/rural) and region (north/south) might vary in their relationship to each other even within the same policy domain. Allowing for this possibility enables variation in the role of violence and youth gangs among young men and young women in the public schools. An intersectional approach might use quantitative strategies to account for this variation across time and space, or might depend on earlier qualitative fieldwork. Recognizing the variation possible across the urban-rural divide may limit or increase the generalizability of any redesign initiative. Finding the answer to this question requires an approach like fuzzy-set logic that is consistent with the intersectional approach to question two in table 1: categories should not be dismissed a priori, but should be ruled in or out based on empirical study.

Given Bell's own personal history and the degree to which it shaped many of the legal outcomes he discusses, it is understandable that his framework assumes a Black-white binary and leaves little room for individual agency in shifting that binary. This presumption of categories as static at the institutional level is elided by his own dependence upon recent case law in Texas that shifts the binary within the racial category to include Latinos. While I don't think that Bell is ideologically averse to the inclusion of Latinos as an educationally underserved population, his turn to white vs. people of color retains the binary, glossing over the combination of individual and institutional factors that would produce a typology rather than a binary of races. Yet an intersectional approach would not simply expand to a typology of discrete racial/ethnic groups within the category. Most importantly, intersectional approaches to collecting and analyzing data would attend to issues of hybridity or multiraciality recognizing the contingency and limitations of groups within categories to self-identify in a personally relevant or empowering way. These dynamic understandings of race have already been established as having an impact on student test performance, which is increasingly the indicator of teacher, school, and district performance, as dictated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.⁵⁵

Moreover, as the logic applies to race in an empirical analysis, each relevant category has its own trajectory of dynamic interaction between individual and institutional factors. An intersectional analysis would attend to this dynamic process of racial-gender formation as the answer to question three in table 1.

Recognition of ethnic, regional, gender, and class diversity among the school-age population that Bell seeks to empower is also critically important in developing effective comprehensive education policy. While these four categories might seem intuitive, a fifth, English-language proficiency, affects students who are from English as a Second Language families and social contexts.⁵⁶

While smaller schools seem to work for many aspects of educational outcomes, persistent cross-racial gaps in test performance, cross-class gaps in drop-out rates, and gender gaps in subject area performance point toward roads that still need to be trod in ensuring equal educations at the K–12 level. Intersectional research in this area would recognize the need to tailor programs based on the empirical findings regarding the relationships illuminated by dimension two of table 1. The incorporation of this within-group diversity into policy proposals and implementation is consistent with an intersectional answer to question four from table 1. It is also facilitated by an approach to data collection that is consistent with fuzzy set analysis.

Bell's analysis of civil rights law emphasizes the role of political institutions in guaranteeing equitable educational outcomes across race. He unwittingly points us to another set of factors that perpetuate inequality with his evocative image illustrating the limits of school financing's ability to create change: “That is like expecting a Pinto to keep up with a Porsche simply because their engines both burn gasoline.”⁵⁷

Focusing solely on individual or institutional factors for education policy to date has not produced equal educational outcomes. In fact emphasizing the interaction between these factors will illuminate a comprehensive picture, providing the best chance for an effective diagnosis and ultimately an effective prescription. An incorporation of individual and institutional factors would produce intersectional analysis in a manner consistent with question five of table 1.

Finally, as I have alluded, an intersectional approach to educational equity would require multiple methods and a design that can produce both empirical and normative theoretical results. It is clear from the hypothetical questions that no project can be addressed by a single method. As stated in the intersectional answer to question six, in order to provide a comprehensive, valid, and generalizable answer to a policy research question, multiple methods are necessary and sufficient.

Intersectionality is sympathetic and applicable to both the structural level of analysis, and individual-level phenomena via its domains of power thesis, which recognizes the various terrains on which politics plays out—structural and interpersonal.⁵⁸

In recognizing both aspects of “intractable political problems,” intersectionality bridges part of the theoretical gap between critical theory, which often faces the dilemma of overemphasis on structural explanations, and liberalism's privileging of the atomized individual.⁵⁹ Intersectionality plays a mediating role between the yin of conspiracy-theory levels of structural research and the yang of pathologizing individual-level microanalyses. Just as neither yin nor yang can function alone, structural and micro-level research pursued in isolation from each other lack significant utility in addressing intractable political problems like persistent poverty, lack of political empowerment, and educational inequality.

The intersectional approach can produce empirical and normative results that can improve both the diagnosis of a policy problem and a prescriptive solution. In so doing, it enables a comprehensive, multi-level approach that dynamically engages individual and institutional factors in policy making across several relevant categories of difference. In the conclusion, I turn to the theoretical underpinnings of intersectionality, along with final comments regarding its impact on public policy.

Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm

Intersectionality stands ontologically between reductionist research that blindly seeks only the generalizable and particularized research so specialized that it cannot contribute to theory. While each individual claim of intersectionality as articulated in table 1 may not be unique, the synthesis produced by the six dimensions is indeed more than the sum of its parts. In this article I have reviewed the three predominant approaches to studying categories like race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in political science.

Intersectionality emerges out of the earlier unitary and multiple approaches, joining with other constructivist efforts in asserting first and foremost that reality is historically and socially constructed. In this way intersectionality represents an emerging paradigm from critical theory and its companion deconstructivist approaches, critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and critical race feminism. All of these approaches acknowledge and incorporate the historical context in which contemporary power relations operate.

Most significantly for our purposes, although intersectionality emerges out of a deconstructionist tradition, it does not remain there. The domains of power thesis elaborates upon these theoretical roots by delineating a shared, integrated terrain upon which various categories of difference interact. It identifies the hegemonic (ideas, cultures, and ideologies), structural (social institutions), disciplinary (bureaucratic hierarchies and administrative practices), and interpersonal (routinized interactions among individuals) playing fields upon which race, gender, class, and other categories or traditions of difference interact to produce society.⁶⁰

Recognition of interactions in multiple domains may reveal additional options for non-traditional coalition building among groups.

While the recognition of four different contexts for policy change may initially appear daunting, designing policy with components in all four areas may succeed to a greater degree than narrowly-focused interventions. Intersectional investigations can shed light upon a number of new questions that remain uninvestigated or unanswered in the discipline. By unpacking the assumptions of the unitary and multiple approaches, intersectionality can fundamentally reshape the way in which political science research is conducted.

First, intersectionality serves as an important corrective for imprudent overemphasis on generalizability that overlooks the priority of producing valid knowledge claims.⁶¹

Opening up rather than assuming a priori the relationship between categories in policy research, for example, provides greater targeting of funds, programs, and resources to groups and communities who require it. Moreover, intersectionality's emphasis on the relationships among categories can illuminate the most effective policy designs, not merely to whom money or other resources should be given.

Intersectionality's emphasis on the dynamic interaction between individual and institutional actors provides a more comprehensive examination of policy success and failure. Methodologically, this has traditionally meant an emphasis on the importance of holistic research that examines the potentially cross-cutting roles of race, class, and gender in the lives of a particular population.⁶²

Yet this emphasis does not then create a pre-determined set of methodologies or doctrines acceptable to all intersectionality theorists.⁶³ One area of research that remains under explored within intersectionality is the development of research designs and methods that can capture effectively all of the tenets of intersectionality theory outlined in table 1.⁶⁴

This article has attempted to begin a conversation in that regard rather than dictate a definitive methodological approach to intersectionality. When combined with fuzzy-set logic, it gains empirical utility and potentially improves data collection for all empirical researchers. In this sense intersectionality as a research paradigm can generate problem-driven research: it takes a problem in the world, analyzes and moves beyond earlier approaches to studying the problem, and develops a more powerful model to test for its effectiveness in addressing the problem.⁶⁵