Ange-Marie Hancock's book celebrates intersectionality as “the most cutting-edge approach to the politics of gender, race, sexual orientation and class” (p. 3) and as a strategy for overcoming the “Oppression Olympics,” the never-ending debates about “who has it toughest” (p. 22). For Hancock, intersectionality is much more than a theoretical framework, a call for legal doctrine reform, or a strategy for remaking feminist and antiracist politics. It is also a “justice-oriented tool” that “provides a lingua franca for multiple generations to discuss the contemporary political context in a way that both acknowledges the past and clears a path for the future” (p. 23).

Hancock calls her version of intersectionality “paradigm intersectionality.” It draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's now-canonical articulation of intersectionality, which exposed how a legal system structured by a race-or-gender logic renders invisible black women's injuries and revealed that race, gender, class, and sexuality are interlocking structures of domination. If Crenshaw imagined black women as the quintessential intersectional subject whose social locations most vividly reveal how multiple marginalization operates, Hancock uses intersectionality more broadly to study how racism, sexism, homophobia, and late capitalism intersect to challenge democratic citizenship. Her paradigm intersectionality takes Crenshaw's fundamental concept—that structures of domination are co-constitutive— and adds to it an interest in Time Dynamics (the idea that “evidence of progress made does not necessarily equal all of the progress that needs to be made” [p. 43]), a commitment to an understanding of diversity within groups, and a recognition that structures of domination are crafted at both individual and institutional levels. This move away from centering black women as intersectional subjects is consistent with Hancock's earlier work, which advocated the uncoupling of intersectionality and “women of color studies” (“Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm,” Politics & Gender 3 [no. 2, 2007]: 251). In the author's hands, intersectionality becomes a tool for “deep political solidarity” that is useful for all subjects, not simply the multiply marginalized, the subjects whose bodies make hypervisible the workings of multiple structures of domination.

As an example of “deep political solidarity,” Hancock examines how paradigm intersectionality can create political connections between seemingly unrelated groups. For example, in her examination of the ongoing debates about gay marriage, she argues that paradigm intersectionality reveals important political connections between straight black women and gay subjects struggling for marriage rights because it “examine[s] the patterns of vulnerability that affect straight black women's and the LGBT community's prospects for marriage” (p. 120). Both straight black women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects struggling for marriage equality share an investment in examining the “unintended consequences” of seemingly progressive legal shifts like Loving v. Virginia (1967). Reading Loving intersectionally reveals the famous case's unintended consequences: While it legalized interracial marriages, black women marry outside of their race at very low numbers, and black women's marriage rates fell dramatically between 1950 and 2000. And, of course, Loving did not even consider the possibility of marriage between same-sex partners. Hancock concludes that this intersectional approach reads Loving for its unintended consequences (p. 121), and reveals that “race and sexual orientation are intertwined as intersecting phenomena that simultaneously convey undeserved privilege and stigma” (p. 122; italics in original).

I admire Hancock's investment in making intersectionality applicable and relevant; Solidarity Politics for Millenials is quite literally a guide, a handbook, that is designed to generate conversation across generation gaps. For example, one chapter ends with strategies for how to talk to someone “a lot older than you” (p. 55) about intersectionality and offers tools like “Watch The Matrix (again, if necessary) with the purpose of analyzing the similarities between the matrix and the complexity of intersectionality as a tool to fight the Oppression Olympics” (p. 55). But the book's commitment to accessibility comes at some cost.

First, the work of other important scholars in the field is often elided. So, for example, Hancock's analysis of gay marriage—particularly the “gay is the new black” rhetoric—would benefit tremendously from an engagement with Siobhan Somerville's work that studies race and sexuality as categories that were imagined in relation to each other in the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, it is not always clear to me why the author is so invested in intersectionality since other scholars, like Cathy Cohen, have done similar work on political solidarity using other frameworks—like queerness. What does intersectionality provide as a solidarity-building tool that other frameworks lack?

Second, I was not particularly convinced by Hancock's generation story. While she imagines her book to create connections between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials, its exercises seemed to presume that these “generations” struggle to speak to each other. But intersectionality is not new to either of these generations: Did the Baby Boomers not see one of intersectionality's great dramas played out on primetime TV (the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings)? And, of course, proto-intersectionalities were being articulated by groups like the Combahee River Collective and activists like France Beale and Deborah King in the 1970s. My questions here seek only to uncover—and problematize—the need for exercises and strategies to promote cross-generational understanding.

Finally, in a moment marked by a “postintersectional” turn in the legal academy, a turn toward “assemblage” rather than intersectionality in critical theory, and a deep skepticism about identity politics, I wanted to hear Hancock explain her fierce attachment to intersectionality. While it has enjoyed cross-disciplinary institutionalization and popularization, it is also increasingly subject to scrutiny, and those of us both inside and outside of the academy who work on identity are increasingly called upon to defend our theoretical and political commitments. I suspect that Hancock's intervention is to think about how to use intersectionality in nonidentitarian ways—or at least in ways that move beyond identity politics—but I found myself eager to hear her more thoroughly and rigorously engage with intersectionality's naysayers.