7 Intersectionality as Critical

Social Theory
Patricia Hill Collins

The varying ways in which people understand intersectionality are more often
assumed than explored, leaving definitions of intersectionality open to interpretation
(Collins, 2015; 2019). Some scholars conceptualize intersectionality as a perspective
(Browne and Misra, 2003; Steinbugler, Press, and Dias, 2006), a concept (Knapp,
2005), a type of analysis (Nash, 2008; Yuval-Davis, 2006), or as a nodal point for
feminist theorizing (Lykke, 2011). Other scholars emphasize intersectionality’s
placement in the research process, with some approaching intersectionality as
a methodological approach (Steinbugler, Press, and Dias, 2006; Yuval-Davis,
2006), a research paradigm (Hancock, 2007a; 2007b), or a measurable variable
and a type of data (Bowleg, 2008). Many scholars categorize intersectionality as
a theory, suggesting that intersectionality is already a social theory and that all we
need to do is apply it. These definitional debates identify important areas of emphasis
for exploring intersectionality’s relationship to social theory, yet beyond laying
down some provocative avenues of investigation, the field itself has yet to system-
atically develop them.
Intersectionality’s emerging relationship to social theory constitutes one impor-
tant definitional dilemma with potentially important implications for both areas.
Social theory brings explanatory power to social phenomena, casting light on certain
dimensions of reality while obscuring others. Moreover, because intersectionality
and social theory both operate in dual registers, namely, the epistemological register
of explaining social phenomena, and the ontological register of participating in and
shaping the social relations that it aims to explain, they potentially have important
intellectual, social, and political effects.
This two-part essay explores the connections between intersectionality and critical
social theory. The first section provides a brief overview of intersectionality’s
emerging canon, paying careful attention to its understandings of and approaches
to social inequality. The second section positions intersectionality in a landscape of
traditional and critical social theory that is alternatively contentious and comple-
mentary. Contemporary intersectionality and social theory are both in flux, with their
meanings shaped by how varying social actors use them for varying purposes across
heterogeneous social contexts. In this context, few definitive answers exist as to
whether intersectionality is a social theory and if so, whether it engages its traditional
and/or critical dimensions. Rather, this essay provides some navigational tools for
investigating the shifting relationship between intersectionality and critical social
theory.

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 121

Intersectionality’s Emerging Canon

Many current debates about intersectionality investigate what kind of
knowledge and/or political project intersectionality is and/or might be (Collins,
2015). Philosopher John Stuhr’s description of American pragmatism parallels my
approach to intersectionality as a discourse, field of study, or knowledge project:
it may be defined by its exponents’ common attitudes, purposes, philosophical
problems, procedures, terminology, and beliefs. It is in virtue of such a shared
complex of features that we identify, understand, and differentiate philosophical
developments, movements, and “schools of thought.” Such a unity of character, we
must recognize, is not a single and simple essence, some necessary and sufficient
feature of classical American philosophy, some property present always and only in
classical American philosophy. Instead, it is an identifiable configuration,
a characteristic shape, a resemblance, an overlapping and interweaving of features
(present to differing degrees in the writings of the individual philosophers) that, as
a relational whole, pervades and constitutes this philosophy and these
philosophers. (Stuhr, 2000: 2–3)

Following Stuhr, I approach intersectionality as a knowledge project that has “devel-

opments, movements, and ‘schools of thought’” within it such that there is no
essential intersectional essence. As a pragmatist philosopher, Stuhr understands
knowledge construction by examining how people use ideas to make meaning in
their lives and, through those meaning-making processes, give meaning to the terms
they use. Within this logic, pragmatism (and intersectionality) is “defined by its
exponents’ common attitudes, purposes, philosophical problems, procedures, termi-
nology, and beliefs.” Pragmatism and intersectionality both have communities of
practitioners, or in pragmatist terms, communities of inquiry that shape the knowl-
edge produced through using it. A focus on people as knowledge creators and
consumers permeates his definition of pragmatism, one taken up in varying ways
across American pragmatism itself (Bernstein, 2010; Joas, 1993). Via this incorpora-
tion of a community of practitioners, intersectionality is neither solely a scholarly
endeavor nor an activist undertaking, but rather constitutes a form of critical inquiry
and praxis (Collins, 2019; Collins and Bilge, 2016).
Here I draw on pragmatism’s interpretive frameworks, yet unlike Stuhr, I stress
how power relations shape knowledge construction processes. Intersecting power
relations provide social contexts that house intersectionality’s heterogeneous
communities of inquiry as well as shape the meanings attributed to intersection-
ality’s arguments. Because social theories have universalizing tendencies, they
can feel far removed from actual politics. Even in social theories that show the
connections between discourse and actual power relations – which is the case, for
example, within Michel Foucault’s studies of medicine, the disciplinary practices
of prisons, and the centrality of religion to the regulation of sexuality – connec-
tions between this grounding in social context and the focus on meaning making
within a specific context can be negated; see for example, how subsequent
scholars have used Foucault’s arguments about knowledge and power (Foucault,
1980).

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 122 patricia hill collins

Following Foucault’s genealogical methodology, I approach intersectionality as

a knowledge project that emerges in tandem with the diverse forms that historically
specific power relations of decolonization and desegregation took locally, regionally,
nationally, and globally. Intersectionality, or more accurately, the constellation of
knowledge projects that have been assembled under the term intersectionality, reflect
the current fluidity and flux of power relations that produce a host of knowledge
projects that aim to explain the erosion of long-standing patterns of social hierarchy
and/or the installation of new ones. Social relations of colonization relied on
segregation, the bedrock of social hierarchies of nation, race, gender, ethnicity,
religion, sexuality and age, which installed various strategies of separating, categor-
izing, and ranking people. In contrast, decolonization and its imperfect desegrega-
tion erodes these borders of colonial power relations. Not only have social groups
long thought to be separate and unequal been brought into common space, but the
knowledge projects associated with group histories have also become more visible
and/or contentious. Because intersectionality emerges from, attends to, and reflects
these social conditions, both the power relations of a decolonizing and desegregating
world, and the contours of intersectionality as a knowledge project are interrelated.
By now, a general consensus exists about intersectionality’s general contours in
academic and nonacademic settings. As a working definition, intersectionality con-
sists of a constellation of ideas and practices that maintain that gender, race, class,
sexuality, age, ethnicity, ability, and similar phenomena constitute a mutually con-
structing constellation of power relationships. They produce unequal material reali-
ties and distinctive social experiences for individuals and groups positioned within
them. This insight creates analytic space for a more robust understanding of the
privileges and penalties associated with intersecting systems of oppression, as well
as a multifaceted conception of standpoint epistemologies and knowledges. Vivian
May’s definition of intersectionality, one more closely aligned with intersectional-
ity’s activist roots, tells a slightly different story:
Intersectionality is a form of resistant knowledge developed to unsettle conventional
mindsets, challenge oppressive power, think through the full architecture of
structural inequalities and asymmetrical life opportunities, and seek a more just
world. It has been formed in the context of struggles for social justice as a means to
challenge dominance, foster critical imaginaries, and craft collective models for
change. (May, 2015: xi)

These working definitions emphasize distinctive aspects of intersectionality’s

positionality as inquiry and praxis, thereby having different implications for social
theory.
A sociology of knowledge analysis of intersectionality thus attends not only to the
substance of intersectionality’s ideas, but also to the specific sites where it is
developed and practiced. In this regard, the academy constitutes an important
venue in which intersectional scholarship has been produced. Recognized by aca-
demic actors in the early 1990s, intersectionality as a form of inquiry moved quickly
into the scholarly mainstream (Collins and Bilge, 2016: 63–87). Yet intersectionality
has never been just another academic discourse. Intersectionality has been associated

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 123

with the intellectual production of African-American women intellectual activists as

well as the intellectual production of women, indigenous people, Latinos and
Latinas, immigrant groups, LGBT people, and similar social actors who have done
intellectual work within “struggles for social justice as a means to challenge dom-
inance, foster critical imaginaries, and craft collective models for change” (May,
2015: xi). This intellectual work produced across varying venues provides
a framework not only for the contemporary scholars cited at the beginning of this
essay, but also for teachers, social workers, parents, policy advocates, university
support staff, community organizers, clergy, lawyers, graduate students, nurses, and
other practitioners who confront contemporary social inequalities. These social
actors engage the ideas of intersectionality, if not intersectionality’s formal scholar-
ship, in myriad ways. It is important to point out that, given its wide-ranging
approaches and concerns, intersectionality has been taken up within activist, policy,
social media, and academic venues (Collins and Bilge, 2016).
Because conceptions of social theory are so closely tied to power relations within
academia, this broader understanding of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry
and praxis also informs intersectionality’s canon formation. Intersectionality has
within it, to paraphrase Stuhr, an identifiable configuration, a characteristic shape,
a resemblance, an overlapping and interweaving of features that are present to
differing degrees in the writings of the large number of individual scholars who
claim intersectionality. Understanding intersectionality as a knowledge project
honed within critical inquiry and praxis highlights several core themes from this
identifiable configuration, namely, attentiveness to (1) intersecting power relations;
(2) relationality; (3) situated knowledge production; and (4) complexity. These
themes are not all present in a given work, their treatment of these themes varies
considerably, and they are not unique to intersectionality. Because intersectionality
has been influenced by multiple social theories, it often shares their basic terminol-
ogy and sensibility, but its use of a common vocabulary does not mean that inter-
sectionality is derivative of extant social theories. Rather, intersectionality’s
intellectual and political association with social relations of decolonization and
desegregation suggests that intersectionality may take up its core themes of power
relations, relationality, situated knowledge production, and complexity in particular
ways.
The significance both of power relations generally, and intersecting power rela-
tions in particular, constitutes one core idea that permeates intersectional knowledge
projects. Intersecting power relations produce social divisions of race, gender, class,
sexuality, ability, age, country of origin, and citizenship status that are unlikely to be
adequately understood in isolation from one another. Non-intersectional scholarship
assumes that race, class, and gender are unconnected variables or features of social
organization that can be studied as singular phenomena, for example, gender or race
as discreet aspects of individual identity, or patriarchy or racism as mono-categorical
systems of power. Intersectionality posits that systems of power coproduce one
another in ways that reproduce both unequal material realities (social locations)
and the distinctive social experiences that characterize people’s experiences within
social hierarchies. Stated differently, racism, sexism, class exploitation, and similar

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 124 patricia hill collins

oppressions may mutually construct one another by drawing upon similar and
distinctive practices and forms of organization that collectively shape social reality.
For any given social context, intersecting power relations constitute a specific
matrix of domination that reflects the particularities of a given time and place
(Collins, 2000). Some aspects of intersecting power relations may be more salient
than others across time and place, for example, intersections of gender, sexuality and
race within twenty-first-century US political campaigns, or the growing centrality of
religion and ethnicity within immigration debates in Europe. Intersectional analyses
are not better or worse based on the number of categories they incorporate. Rather,
intersectional analyses begin with the most salient forms of intersectionality in
a given social context, and deepen analysis by looking within that context for
additional categories that explain power relations, as well as outside that context
(through history and/or geographic space) for insight about the power relations of
interest.
Relationality constitutes a second core idea that underpins intersectional knowl-
edge projects (Phoenix and Pattynama, 2006: 187). This emphasis on relationality
shifts focus away from the essential qualities that seemingly lie in the center of
categories and toward the relational processes that sustain categories. Race, gender,
class, and other systems of power are constituted and maintained through relational
processes, gaining meaning through the nature of these relationships. The analytic
importance of relationality in intersectional scholarship demonstrates how various
social positions (occupied by actors, systems, and political/economic structural
arrangements) necessarily acquire meaning and power (or a lack thereof) in relation-
ship to other social positions.
This focus on relationality highlights the intersecting and co-constructing nature
of social systems and structures organized around power and inequality. Intersecting
power relations occur on multiple levels of social analysis, from the micro-level of
identities to the macro-level processes of public policy. For example, Collins (2010)
addresses the political implications of intersectionality’s conceptualization of social
groups as fundamentally characterized by interrelationships across power differ-
ences. Indeed, the very prefix given to the term intersectionality marks an important
departure away from the binary Western thinking that classifies idea systems and eras
according to pre- and post- (e.g., pre-modern, post-structuralism); instead, prefixes
such as inter- and trans- reflect the interrelated nature of social power relations that is
increasingly recognized in social and political theory, as well as in intersectionality.
Intersectionality’s ability to draw attention to and account for inter-social locations –
including those on the margins – challenges binary thinking, shifting the analytic
focus onto the fluidity among, interrelationships between, and coproduction of
various categories and systems of power.
A third core idea of intersectionality concerns the theme of situated knowledge
production, namely, how intersecting power relations of social inequality catalyze
varying standpoints, epistemologies, and knowledges (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis,
2002). Intersectional knowledge production emphasizes how the distinctive social
locations of individuals and groups within intersecting power relations catalyze
multiple experiences and perspectives on social phenomena. Building on

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 125

Foucault’s thesis that knowledge and power relations are co-forming (Foucault,
1980), intersectionality provides a more robust power analytic that draws from
multiple interpretive traditions, for example, racism as a system of power, hetero-
patriarchy as a system of power, and so on drawing from Marxist social thought’s
commitment to standpoint epistemology in order to suggest that multiple knowledge
projects characterize intersectionality’s heterogeneity. This knowledge/power fra-
mework has been criticized as a simple reversal of the privileged standpoint that
formerly accrued to Western social thought, granting, for example, Latinas versus
elite White men a superior analysis of power relations. Yet this criticism is disin-
genuous, projecting onto less powerful groups the mindset and behaviors of the more
powerful. Whereas an individual thinker may fall victim to the same fallacies as elite
intellectuals, the field of intersectionality is sufficiently inclusive and dynamic to
keep these tendencies at bay. Efforts to install a privileged standpoint from within
intersectionality runs headlong into multiple perspectives that characterize intersec-
tionality as a critical form of inquiry and praxis.
One important dimension of situated knowledge production concerns what is
visible and invisible to differently situated actors. Intersectionality speaks not just
to what can be seen, but also what can be experienced within varying social
locations. These differences in experience and self-reflexivity concerning one’s
own actions and those of others can catalyze dramatically different interpretations
of social phenomena that may share a common vocabulary but have a markedly
different worldview. For example, for those involved in praxis and in much inter-
sectional scholarship, social justice lies at the heart of intersectionality’s purpose.
A normative goal of intersectionality lies in not simply understanding social inequal-
ity, or multiple discriminations against an individual, or how power works, but also
problem-solving about the injustices that these phenomena signal. Quite simply,
people who are closer to the bottom of any social hierarchy are more likely to
develop different analyses of social injustice and social justice than those who are
privileged within these same systems. Intersectionality makes these relations more
complex, arguing for multiplicity that places individuals and groups as differentially
disadvantaged and privileged within intersecting power relations, with equally
complex standpoints concerning the meaning of social justice.
Finally, the complexities of actual social relations, a complexity catalyzed by
decolonization and desegregation in a global context, fosters complexity within
intersectionality as a knowledge project. In a widely cited article, “The
Complexity of Intersectionality,” McCall provides a provisional template for think-
ing through the relationship between complexity and intersectionality (McCall,
2005). McCall identifies three methodological approaches that scholars of intersec-
tionality use when making sense of analytic “categories” (such as race, class, gender,
etc.); each approach treats the complexity of such categories differently. While
anticategorical analyses deconstruct categorical boundaries by exposing their
socially constructed nature, intercategorical complexity strategically assumes the
reality of such categories in an effort to document social inequalities between
different categorical groups. The third approach, intracategorical complexity, adopts
analytic features of anti- and intercategorical complexity by deconstructing

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 126 patricia hill collins

categories while strategically accepting their existence in an effort to document

social inequalities within a “master” category. McCall points to the work of
Crenshaw (1991) and other feminists of color as working within this intracategorical
register of analysis (McCall, 2005: 1779). Notably, McCall (2005) recognizes that
varying types of methodological approaches shape different intersectional knowl-
edge projects (2005: 1774). Intersectional knowledge projects achieve greater levels
of complexity because they are iterative and interactional, always examining the
connections among seemingly distinctive categories of analysis.
Within the academy, these dimensions of intersectionality have changed the
discourse on social inequality, recasting the main ideas of inequality more broadly
than through race-only or gender-only frameworks as well as challenging standard
assumptions about social inequality in a desegregating world. While previous
research on inequality focused largely on those bearing the brunt of that inequality
(e.g., women, minorities, the poor), intersectionality’s emphasis on the complex and
co-constructing relationship between systems of power highlights the importance of
researching the privileged as well as the disadvantaged in order to more fully address
the complex and multifaceted dynamics of inequality (Choo and Ferree, 2010).
Overall, intersectionality’s focus on intersecting power relations, relationality, situ-
ated knowledge, and complexity has expanded the optics that the field can use to
deepen its analyses of many issues.

The Social Problem of Social Inequality: Intersectionality’s Object

of Investigation?
The previous section introduces four distinguishing features of intersectionality as
a knowledge project, pointing to intersectionality as an interpretive framework that
can be used to make meaning of the world, and to intersectionality’s placement in
a set of social practices that articulate with power relations. Self-reflexivity is crucial
to the kind of intellectual and political work that intersectionality sets out to do.
Casting a self-reflexive eye on intersectionality as a knowledge project highlights the
contested nature of intersectionality’s canon formation within the intellectual, poli-
tical, and social context of the neoliberal university. Contextualizing intersection-
ality within power relations sheds light not just on the thematic content of
intersectionality’s emerging canon, but also on the political significance of canon
formation. Vivian May’s (2014) understanding of intersectionality as a form of
resistant knowledge that is dedicated to unsettling conventional scholarship and
challenging prevailing power hierarchies envisions a particular pathway for inter-
sectionality. Whether intersectionality can actualize this approach and do so within
the strictures of canon formation in the academy remains an open question. How
might this particular understanding of intersectionality as a resistant knowledge
work with processes of canon formation?
Prevailing stories of the emergence of intersectionality routinely claim that
Kimberlé Crenshaw “coined” the term intersectionality in her Stanford Law
Review article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color” (Crenshaw, 1991). These narratives rarely

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 127

include prior periods of social movement politics and their social justice projects,
and instead, confine themselves to locating a point of origin within the academy.
Despite the centrality of Black feminism to intersectionality, as well as ignoring
the decade or so of race/class/gender studies that maintained visible ties with
social justice projects outside the academy and paved the way for intersectionality
within it (see, e.g., Dill, 2009), contemporary narratives concerning the emergence
of intersectionality as an academic discourse within American higher education
situate its origins within academia. This framing of intersectionality’s emerging
canon suggests that the ideas that are now categorized under the umbrella of
intersectionality remained unimportant until they came to the attention of powerful
institutional actors. Naming intersectionality seemingly legitimated it. This fram-
ing also suggests that any theorizing that might be associated with intersectionality
could not have occurred outside the academy, among derogated social actors that
are associated with social movement activism and, and most importantly, using
a broad array of theoretical tools of academic knowledge production. This framing
assumption of canon formation limits understanding of the scope and significance
of intersectionality and suppresses its aspirations toward resistant knowledge
(Alexander-Floyd, 2012).
As is often noted, intersectionality remains closely associated with Black femin-
ism, the intellectual production of African-American women, as well as with
Latinas, indigenous peoples, and similar social actors who were subordinated within
intersecting systems of oppression. Yet the more interesting question is why Marx,
Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Bourdieu, Foucault, and a long list of elite Western
social theorists failed to advance intersectional arguments? These figures had aca-
demic training and credentials, access to publishing venues, and intellectual legiti-
macy that far exceeded anything that was available to women of color. Yet these
figures consistently failed to analyze racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, and similar forms
of social inequality. Were they capable of seeing and understanding intersectionality,
yet chose to look the other way? Or did they simply not need it?
The parallel question is, how and why might social actors in less powerful social
locations be more apt to advance intersectional analyses than social actors in more
powerful ones? African-American women’s intellectual history provides an impor-
tant context for teasing out the knowledge/power relations of intersectionality as
a knowledge project (Bay et al., 2015; Collins, 2000). African-American social and
political thought had long analyzed racial inequality as its primary focus, with an eye
toward understanding it and dismantling it. Three focal points underlay the logic of
African-American social and political thought: (1) African Americans as
a collectivity faced distinctive social problems that took a particular form because
of race; (2) racial inequality had a distinctive political organization (e.g., slavery, de
jure and de facto racial segregation in the United States, and colonialism in con-
tinental Africa and the Caribbean), as well as throughout school, jobs, housing, and
other social institutions that collectively organized racial inequality; and (3) racism
as a system of power with ideological and material components explained both the
social problems that confronted African Americans and the institutional forms they
took. Black women intellectuals drew upon this foundational framework, and

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 128 patricia hill collins

expanded it beyond racial inequality in response to actual social problems that they
faced as Black people, as women, as poor people, and as second-class citizens.
As the growing corpus of scholarship on Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper,
and other Black women intellectuals suggests, some saw gender early and often but
initially framed their intersectional analysis within the political context of projects
for racial justice. Theorizing had a practical dimension, in this case conceptualizing
gender as both an addition to and a necessary corrective for projects for racial
equality. Over time, for many African-American women intellectuals, it became
clear that analyzing racial inequality by itself could deliver neither adequate expla-
nations for the social problems Black women encountered, nor adequate guidance
for action. This deepening complexity of Black feminist analysis mirrors complexity
as a core theme of intersectionality itself. Intersectionality was neither a replacement
for racial analysis, nor was it opposed to it. Rather, analyzing the social problems,
social organization, and power relations that produced racial inequality required
additional analytical lenses that might provide better theoretical insight. For exam-
ple, violence, an endemic global social problem that occurs on all levels of social
analysis and that touches all people in different ways, constituted one important
social problem that preoccupied Black women intellectuals and was a catalyst to
their intersectional analysis (Cooper, 1892; Giddings, 2008). Decades later,
Kimberlé Crenshaw deepened an intersectional analysis, naming it as such, by
arguing that an intersectional analysis was needed to address violence against
women of color (Crenshaw, 1991). Violence persists as a catalyst for inquiry and
praxis that draws upon intersectional frameworks (Collins and Bilge, 2016: 48–55).
Using intersectionality as a way of making meaning of the world took specific
form across varying periods of African-American women’s history, yet only came
into public view in the context of post–World War II global power upheavals. During
the 1950s–1970s, many groups found themselves facing similar political challenges
with social inequalities to those of Black women, encountering variations of similar
social problems and using distinctive tools from their social contexts to deal with
them. For example, Chicana feminist theory and practice had a distinctive history
and organizational framework that also embraced intersectional complexity. The
core features of intersectionality took special form within each group’s history, yet
how individuals and groups analyzed their own social location and political aspira-
tions within intersecting systems of power is more generalizable. Desegregation
catalyzed the increasingly visibility granted the ideas of intersectionality, but also the
meaning of these ideas for resistant knowledge projects.
In an era of neoliberalism, Black feminism, intersectionality, and similar social
justice projects encounter new challenges within the academy. For one, diagnosing
and remedying social inequality and its concomitant social problems, the object of
investigation long associated with intersectionality’s emergence, has been increas-
ingly supplanted by a focus on identity as intersectionality’s primary object of
investigation. For another, rather than seeing intersectionality as a broad, expansive
framework that encompasses race, gender, class, sexuality, and other key categories,
intersectionality has been increasingly cast as a feminist project or theory within the
framing assumptions of feminism. This framing of intersectionality as the progeny of

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 129

feminism recasts the function of intersectionality as one of making contributions to

feminist theory (Davis, 2008). Combining these two focal points re-presents inter-
sectionality as a feminist theory of identity, with varying critiques of intersectionality
stemming from this limited understanding. Increasingly, Black feminist scholars and
others who reject these framing assumptions, either in whole or in part, have
launched sustained criticisms of these critiques of intersectionality (see, e.g.,
Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Bilge, 2013; Cooper, 2015; May, 2014). The approach
taken here, namely, viewing intersectionality as a knowledge project that is broadly
defined as a form of critical inquiry and praxis, counteracts these academic debates,
which seem overly confined to women’s and gender studies. Myriad social actors,
both inside and outside the academy, draw upon intersectionality for a variety of
projects, including those concerning identity. Within the broad parameters of inter-
sectionality, actors are far more engaged in inquiry and praxis that uses and evaluate
intersectionality to speak to social inequality.
In this context, can contemporary intersectionality in academic venues sustain its
focus on social inequality as an object of investigation? If so, how might intersec-
tionality incorporate the complexities of heterogeneous interpretive traditions of
inequalities associated with racism, sexism, class exploitation, homophobia, nation-
alism, and xenophobia, spelling out the interconnections among the theoretical
traditions that accompany these areas of investigation as well as their collective
contributions to intersectionality as social theory? When it comes to thinking through
intersectionality’s standing as social theory, these questions lie at the heart of
intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis. It’s tempting to treat
intersectionality just like any other social theory, hoping that when it is appropriately
mainstreamed it will settle down and take its place at the table of Western social
theory. All social theories in the academy encounter the common challenge of
gaining legitimation within prevailing academic norms, and, as a result, the impetus
to make intersectionality conform is strong. Scholars are well aware of the stiff
penalties attached to social theories that cannot properly be disciplined to academic
norms. Yet as the brief genealogy of intersectionality presented here suggests,
intersectionality is not a typical knowledge project.
In the self-reflexive approach to intersectionality taken thus far, I have taken pains
to point out how contextualizing intersectionality in the intersecting power relations
that house it catalyzes an intellectual and political complexity that other social
theories can simply ignore. In theorizing, I doubt that Pierre Bourdieu or Judith
Butler, for example, paid serious attention to how their social location as privileged
intellectuals shaped what they were able to say as well as how their conformity to
preexisting academic norms catalyzed the seemingly effortless reception of their
ideas. Ideas such as habitus or performativity may seem to be the product of their
individual brilliance, but they were only able to advance these ideas in a context
where they were already empowered to do so. Neither Foucault nor Butler had to
work to make the conditions of their intellectual work possible. My sense is that,
even if either thought about the hierarchical power dynamics that surrounded their
work, such relations were of minor concern and not a major barrier to their being able
to do intellectual work in the first place. Philosopher Jose Medina’s discussion of

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 130 patricia hill collins

“active ignorance and the epistemic vices of the privileged” (Medina, 2013: 30–40)
speaks to this sense of what can be taken for granted and rendered unimportant
within intellectual work. Intersectionality has had no such luxury. The difficulties of
introducing a power analytic into the process of doing intellectual work shapes
intersectional inquiry and praxis.
Because social theory is so closely tied to epistemology, an entity which itself is
implicated in reproducing social inequality, intersectionality finds itself in a complex
interpretive space regarding its relation to social theory. Power relations that privi-
lege certain groups of social actors and penalize others apply differential standards to
the knowledge projects that are associated with differentially empowered groups.
Social theory itself has been the purview of educated Western elites whereby the
value of a theory can rest less on the integrity of the theory itself, than on the ability
of privileged intellectuals to legitimate their worldviews. Despite efforts to demo-
cratize social theory, the binary thinking that underlies social hierarchy, for example,
theory/practice, or theory/application or theory/stories, has been difficult to dislodge.
Intersectionality originates in resistant knowledge projects that took aim at social
inequalities produced by racism, sexism, heterosexism, capitalism, nationalism, and
similar systems of power. Ironically, many of these dissident knowledge projects
criticized how social theory upheld social hierarchy by aiming to provide
a corrective to current practices, thereby decentering Western social theory itself
(see, e.g., the essays in Go, 2013), as well as valorizing the oppositional knowledge
projects advanced by subordinated groups. Ironically, during intersectionality’s
institutional incorporation, feminist philosophers took aim at the very foundations
of Western knowledge, providing concise analyses of issues of the power relations of
standpoint epistemology and of social justice (Harding, 1986; Hartsock, 1983;
Young, 1990). Many of these heterogeneous sites of critique aimed not just to
deconstruct existing power relations but also to generate new ways of knowing
and theorizing the social world (Santos, 2007).
Social theory constitutes a site of intellectual and political contestation. Theory is
neither objective nor outside of politics; rather, social theories participate in inter-
secting power relations by contributing explanations for and justification of the
social inequalities that underpin social hierarchies. What might it mean for inter-
sectionality to function as a social theory in this context?

Positioning Intersectionality in a Theoretical Landscape

Social actors who advance resistant knowledge projects consistently dis-
tinguish them from mainstream or dominant projects using the prefix critical. While
many scholars, including myself, use this rubric, calling something “critical” doesn’t
necessarily make it so. It may not even make it social theory. In my prior work,
I deploy an earlier version of the sociology of knowledge approach deployed here
that situates social theory within power relations and aligns critical social theory with
the knowledge projects of African-American women and similarly subordinated
groups (Collins, 1998). In Fighting Words, I offered the following definition of

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 131

critical social theory: “critical social theory encompasses bodies of knowledge and
sets of institutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing
groups of people differently placed in specific political, social, and historic contexts
characterized by injustice. What makes critical social theory ‘critical’ is its commit-
ment to justice, for one’s own group and/or for other groups” (Collins, 1998: xiv).
While this working definition still rings true for me, the changing political context
and the broadening scope of how intersectionality has traveled into a variety of
venues suggests that my working definition’s emphasis on social justice would not be
supported by many scholars of intersectionality as being central to what they do.
In this context, investigating intersectionality’s relationship to social theory gen-
erally, and critical social theory in particular, becomes vital. The meaning of critical
social theory is surprisingly unspecified, ranging from a relatively narrow focus on
the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to a broader categorization that incorpo-
rates a plethora of intellectuals and theories that are deemed to be doing critical
scholarship. The term critical theory has been closely associated with the Frankfurt
School, a group of philosophers, sociologists, social psychologists, and cultural
critics who primarily worked in the 1930s (see, e.g., Held, 1980). European scholars
build on this foundation, tracing the ideas of the Frankfurt School into the contem-
porary period as exemplary of critical theory (Held, 1980). Piet Strydom provides an
especially comprehensive treatment of critical theory, identifying how its main ideas
were carried forward into contemporary expressions, fostering a useful engagement
with pragmatism (Strydom, 2011).
The term critical social theory seemingly builds on the orienting scaffold of the
Frankfurt School yet often goes far beyond its intellectual roots in Marxist social
theory (Calhoun, 1995). Despite a widely shared language, the meaning of critical
social theory as an entity unto itself remain unspecified. Some authors identify social
theories that they categorize as being “critical” of some aspect of mainstream social
theory as archetypes for critical social theory. For example, Calhoun identifies post-
structuralist and feminist theory in such fashion, privileging the idea of difference
drawn from the seeming preoccupations of these particular theories as the core theme
for contemporary critical social theory writ large (Calhoun, 1995). Agger takes
a similar path, identifying feminist theory and cultural studies as critical social
theories, also positioning them in relation to Marxist social thought as a seemingly
foundational critical social theory (Franklin, 2014). In other cases, the boundaries of
critical theory are established by focusing on the “Other”; this can be seen, for
example, in Gerard Delanty’s attempt to revitalize critical social theory by introdu-
cing the idea of cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2009).
Still others claim a looser framework for critical theory itself, one that resembles
Calhoun and Agger’s expansive renditions of critical social theory. Jon Simons’
edited volume of fifteen essays on key contemporary theorists assembles a list of
seemingly canonical figures who stand for the ideas that make theory “critical.” The
opening paragraph to his introduction provides a concise statement of how he
approaches critical theory: “The type and range of ‘critical theory’ covered in this
volume refers to the broad sense of that term as it is used in Anglophone academia as
a catch-all phrase for a divergent set of theories that distinguish themselves from

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 132 patricia hill collins

conventional or traditional theories” (Simons, 2010: 1). Taking a canonical approach

to theory, Simons specifies the criteria he uses for selection as follows: “The thinkers
covered in this volume are those who had established significant trans-disciplinary
reputations in the Anglophone world since about 1990, though they are likely to have
been well known in some circles before then” (Simons, 2010: 3). This sample by
reputation within the anglophone world yields a list of “critical thinkers” including,
among others, Giorgo Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler,
Donna Haraway, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek. Collectively, these approaches
suggest that we imagine a constellation of social theories and/or social thinkers who
are inherently “critical” of something, in the case of Simons, those with reputations
within the anglophone world, then extrapolate the defining criteria of critical social
theory from this small sample.
In this definitional context, which seems biased toward the epistemological frame-
works of Western social theory itself, how “critical” are theories that carry the
designated mantle of critical social theory? Certainly post-structuralism, feminist
theory, and cultural studies have critical elements that are deployed via theoretical
mechanisms, but in the absence of any specified criteria for what distinguishes
critical social theory from other forms of theory, it is difficult to see exactly how
these forms of social inquiry constitute benchmarks for critical social theory itself.
Moreover, this list many not be exhaustive. Some forms of theorizing may or may
not result in recognizable social theories that may be equally if not more “critical”
than these agreed-upon benchmarks. Furthermore, social theories that seem to be
inherently critical may engage in practices that pay far less attention to criticizing
social inequality itself in favor of arguments on issues that most concern individual
theorists, for example, personal identity.
Intersectionality faces a difficult task in specifying those of its actual and potential
connections to critical social theory that stem from its own ideas and practices.
Taking a predefined definition of critical social theory and seeing how intersection-
ality measures up constitutes one way to proceed. A more iterative approach places
both intersectionality and social theory in the processes of knowledge production
that are provisional and contextual. In other words, both projects aim to make
meaning about specific aspects of the social world in particular times and places.
This approach to knowledge construction conceptualizes genealogies of intersec-
tionality as emergent, and views extant definitions of social theory, critical and
otherwise, as provisional and contextual. The first section’s summary of intersec-
tionality’s history and its growth within the academy, its main ideas, and its standing
within academic venues provides a brief genealogy for positioning intersectionality
within a theoretical landscape.
When it comes to conceptualizing both intersectionality and social theory as
provisional and contextual, Max Horkheimer’s 1937 classic essay “Traditional and
Critical Theory” offers a useful rubric for cutting into the expansive discourses of
both forms of inquiry. Horkheimer’s rubric takes us closer to the epistemological
underpinnings of theory itself, versus using the content of a knowledge project as the
primary criteria with which to analyze its theoretical contours. While this particular
essay draws from Marxist social thought, and reflects the tenor of the times, it

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 133

articulates well with a sociology of knowledge perspective that takes knowledge and
power relations into account in examining any knowledge project.
The scholarly content of Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School
was resistant, yet here I emphasize the epistemological criteria that underpinned their
work. In this essay, Horkheimer sketches out what he sees as important epistemolo-
gical distinctions among social theories that alternately claim and reject the status of
critical (Horkheimer, 1982). Using Horkheimer’s framing of the distinctions
between traditional and critical theory as a jumping-off point for identifying issues
concerning the connections between intersectionality and critical social theory, I ask,
how might treating the categories of traditional and critical social theory as them-
selves provisional and contextual shed light on the critical nature of theory generally
and of intersectionality in particular?

What Makes a Traditional Social Theory “Traditional”?

Within Western social sciences, the definition of theory has been relatively straight-
forward. For most researchers, theory consists of the sum total of propositions about
a subject that are linked with each other such that a few remain basic and the rest
derive from them. The fewer primary principles there are in any given theory, the
better the theory. Containing conceptually formulated knowledge on the one hand
and the facts to be subsumed under it on the other, traditional theory in the sciences
evolves by trying to ensure that derived propositions remain consonant with actual
facts. If theory and the so-called facts contradict each other, one or both must be re-
examined because either the scientist has failed to observe correctly or something is
wrong with the principles of the theory (Horkheimer, 1982: 188).
This general understanding of social theory has had an important impact on the
contemporary social sciences. Social science theories typically examine a particular
issue or social phenomenon, for example, a social question, an ongoing debate,
a philosophical concept, or an important social problem. Moreover, theories within
Western social science typically deploy distinctive epistemological frameworks in
the process of theorizing, specifically, maintaining a division between a context of
discovery and a context of justification. Methodologies reflect epistemological
assumptions concerning criteria for legitimation, for deciding what counts as evi-
dence, and even who is qualified to do social theory in the first place. Social theories
gain legitimacy via their universalism, namely, their ability to explain cases across
many topics and often fields of study.
Horkheimer wrote during a period when the promise of positivist science was
increasingly subject to ideological challenges. Horkheimer’s defense of traditional
theory seems wedded to his refusal to relinquish Enlightenment ideals that brought
informed scientific knowledge to bear on important social issues. Theory in its
traditional form engages in the critical examination of data with the aid of an
inherited apparatus of concepts and judgments. Yet Horkheimer also recognized
the necessity of a self-reflexive impetus within Western science. Science might make
substantial contributions to human well-being when its traditional theory concen-
trated on the problems raised within its own internal technical development and,

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 134 patricia hill collins

addressed these problems by either changing its theoretical assumptions and/or by

searching for new data (Horkheimer, 1982: 205). In this sense, applying traditional
theory to social problem-solving might catalyze a positive social function.
Horkheimer wrote in the context of a nation state run by an elected Nazi party, the
expansion and legitimation of eugenics as a global science, and the encroaching
nature of ideology and politics on what had been science as a noble endeavor.
Writing two decades later in the US context, C. Wright Mills was far less sanguine
about traditional theory’s contributions to social betterment. Mills launched two key
criticisms of what he called grand theory, again focused on the social sciences, that
might be applied more broadly to any social theory that garners standing as tradi-
tional. The first criticism concerns intelligibility: “We really must ask: Is grand
theory merely a confused verbiage or is there, after all, also something there?”
(Mills, 2000: 27). Mills’s second criticism concerns the significance of abstraction:
The basic cause of grand theory is the initial choice of a level of thinking so general
that its practitioners cannot logically get down to observation. They never, as
grand theorists, get down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical
and structural contexts. The absence of a firm sense of genuine problems, in turn,
makes for the unreality so noticeable in their pages. One resulting characteristic is
a seemingly arbitrary and certainly endless elaboration of distinction, which neither
enlarges our understanding nor make our experience more sensible. (Mills, 2000: 33).

In essence, the attention to details could generate a swamp of particularities that

might make it difficult to see the big picture.
Social science research that examines social inequality draws from the tenets of
traditional theory in order to produce knowledge for social betterment. The issue
becomes the use to which research is put, primarily how it becomes incorporated into
and potentially transforms traditional theories of social inequality. Here intersection-
ality has had substantial impact, adding more complexity to standard analyses of
social inequality. For example, Charles Tilly’s durable inequality creatively exam-
ines why inequalities themselves persist (Tilly, 1998). Yet Tilly’s analysis of inequal-
ity-generating mechanisms clarifies some questions and raises others. He notes,
“students of inequality must still examine whether such historical accumulations
have such regularity and power that exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation,
and adaptation work differently depending on which categorical distinctions they
employ” (Tilly, 1998: 241). As in the case of other social theories with universalizing
tendencies, Tilly suggests that explanations might vary if categories such as race,
gender, sexuality, and the like were used to test his theory, yet the overall, universal
analysis would remain valid. An intersectional contrast, in comparison, would begin
with the particularities of these categories and see whether Tilly’s model could be
built at all from the data he marshals. Working both ways would still advance
traditional theory’s goal of bringing its theoretical model and empirical findings
into alignment.
Positivist social science is often categorized as the grand theory that has influ-
enced Western traditional theory, yet not all traditional social theory has come
through science. Using the tools of philosophy, post-structuralism, identified by
both Calhoun and Agger as inherently critical, has launched a very important critique

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 135

of Western social theory, much of it initially aimed at the positivist dimensions of

Western science. For many post-structuralist theorists, positivism’s scientific theory
constitutes the traditional grand narrative to be overcome. Yet whereas post-
structuralism may justifiably claim the resistant intent of its content in relation to
the traditional social theory that was its Other, the political economy of its production
and consumption raise questions about whether post-structuralism increasingly
functions as another kind of traditional theory, for example, a hegemonic social
theory that serves the same purpose of the theory it displaced.
Post-structuralism has theorized differently about social inequality, often by not
paying much attention to it at all, or situating issues of structural social inequality
within apolitical identity debates. More importantly, its rules of engagement with
power relations seemingly stand in the same relation to subordinated populations as
a traditional scientific theory. In this sense, theories of scientific truth organized via
technologies of discovery and justification and post-structuralist theories of differ-
ence that, for Calhoun, underpin critical social theory itself, perform important,
political gatekeeping functions. For science, only those who can uphold the tenets
of science itself can produce and consume scientific theory. For post-structuralism,
only those who can understand and manipulate post-structuralism’s often unintelli-
gible prose and abstractions can gain admission into its inner circle.
Whether scientific or post-structural, within the tenets of traditional theory, the
placement of the individual intellectuals within a web of group-based social relations
that are typically White, male, well-educated and Western, and the effects that these
relationships might have on theoretical knowledge and on the processes of producing
it, are of little concern to knowledge outcomes. Science erases the individual in
defense of avoiding bias. Individuals need to deny their race, class, gender, or other
aspects of their placement within intersecting power relations, as a way to protect the
integrity of the research process. In contrast, individuals and individualism are ever-
present within post-structuralism’s particularity. Race, gender, sexuality, class, citi-
zenship status, and other aspects of identity arrive as categories that can be reas-
sembled and given multiple meanings. This idea resembles the meaning making of
pragmatism, but far too often, post-structural analysis remain untethered from
structural power relations. More ominously, post-structuralism obscures the privi-
leged social location of its own intellectuals by refusing to consider how it operates
as an elite discourse, particularly regarding intelligibility and abstraction. While
claiming a language of critique, theorizing the impossibility of stable identities and
social groups, post-structuralist theories provide sustained arguments against the
categories themselves.
When it comes to social inequality, traditional social theories of science and post-
structuralism both yield mixed results. Their meaning is contextual and contingent.
Because grand theories of social science and post-structuralism both demonstrate
universalizing ambitions, albeit with different objects of investigation and tools of
analysis, they both function in some settings as traditional theories and in others as
more closely aligned with critical social theory within intersecting power relations.
Social inequality may form the content of such universalizing theory, yet the theory
itself becomes inherently traditional if not hegemonic as it fails to disrupt social

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 136 patricia hill collins

inequality itself. Stated differently, one can make a career of theorizing social
inequality, using the tools of science and post-structuralism alike, with little impact
on social inequality itself.

What Makes Critical Social Theory “Critical”?

Traditional social theory often fails to take a critical posture either toward its own
scientific project or the processes that legitimate it. In contrast, critical theory takes
into consideration the entire knowledge production and consumption process, often
casting a self-reflexive eye not only on its own assumptions and practices, but also on
the effects it generates (Collins, 2019). Horkheimer’s essay provides an important
touchstone for social theory because he positions traditional and critical social theory
within relational frameworks of how these forms of theory inform one another, as
well as how each is situated within broader political, epistemological, and ethical
contexts. Because Horkheimer’s essay examines the epistemological underpinnings
of Western social theory that consider the relationship between inquiry and praxis, it
provides a useful framework for assessing intersectionality’s aspirations toward
critical social theory.
Horkheimer spells out what he means by the term critical:
The critical attitude of which we are speaking is wholly distrustful of the rules of
conduct with which society as presently constituted provided each of its members.
The separation between individual and society in virtue of which the individual
accepts as natural the limits prescribed for his activity is relativized in critical theory.
The latter considers the overall framework which is conditioned by the blind
interaction of individual activities (that is, the existent division of labor and the class
distinctions) to be a function which originated in human action and therefore is
a possible object of planful decision and rational determination of
goals. (Horkheimer, 1982: 207)

Here, Horkheimer clearly embraces the positive benefits of reason for bettering
society – a shared dimension of traditional and critical theory – yet rejects traditional
theory’s tendency to naturalize and thereby justify existing forms of social
organization.
Horkheimer identifies elements of critical social theory with special implications
for intersectionality that distinguish it from its more traditional counterparts. Critical
social theories seemingly share several epistemological tenets: (1) a dialectical
analysis that recognizes and takes into account their positionality within the specific
spatial and temporal power relations in which they are situated; (2) adherence to an
ethical social justice framework that aspires to better society; (3) reflective account-
ability concerning their own practices in producing intersectional knowledge; (4)
a distinctive theory of how social change has been and might be brought about. How
does intersectionality articulate with each of these tenets?
First, because actual social relations are inherently power relations, critical
social theory engages in a dialectical analysis that is cognizant of structures of
power as well as its own relationship to them. Horkheimer contends that critical
theory originates not in the “idealist critique of pure reason” but rather in

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 137

a dialectical process that is critical of the ways that the political economy is
organized (Horkheimer, 1982: 206). By implication, this dialectical approach
criticizes the outcomes of current social arrangements, among them social inequal-
ity, which for Horkheimer meant class inequality. This framework rejects the
epistemological stance of traditional theory – that science operates as a mirror
of the world – in favor of a dialectical conception of knowledge whereby what
counts as theories and/or facts are part of an ongoing historical process in which
the way we view the world (theoretically or otherwise) and the way the world is
are reciprocally determined.
Neither critical social theory nor intersectionality are embedded exclusively
within academic disciplines, and thus shaped solely by them. Rather, both critical
social theory under Horkheimer’s definition and intersectionality’s reach within and
across academic disciplines and outside the academy are also embedded within
a web of relational power relations. The material for dialectical engagement is
vast, suggesting that the singular scholar could not possibly do intellectual work
alone and that broader interdisciplinary, dialogical engagements are essential. By
bringing different disciplines together, the scholars of the Frankfurt School modeled
this process, positing that working on social issues across disciplinary boundaries
would yield insights that were unobtainable by working within narrow and increas-
ingly specialized academic domains. Via this commitment to interdisciplinary work,
they modeled an intellectual synergy across academic disciplines, but also potential
synergies among theoretical approaches of traditional and critical theory that fore-
shadow intersectionality and similar contemporary interdisciplinary projects.
Second, critical social theory has an explicitly ethical or normative dimension – it
aspires to better society by both understanding and transforming it. This impetus for
social transformation is more evident within broader Marxist social theory that
influenced the Frankfurt School, but Horkheimer’s initial framing of critical theory
expresses the nucleus of a social justice ethos. In the 1937 essay, Horkheimer
mentions social justice, pointing to critical social theory as a potential site of
resistance to epistemic injustice: “For all its insight into the individual steps in social
change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional
theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for
the abolition of social injustice” (Horkheimer, 1982: 242). Horkheimer suggests that
grappling with social injustice is a central activity of critical theory: “But the
transmission will not take place via solidly established practice and fixed ways of
acting but via concern for social transformation. Such a concern will necessarily be
aroused ever anew by prevailing injustice, but it must be shaped and guided by the
theory itself and in turn react upon the theory” (Horkheimer, 1982: 241). Because
social theories can be marshaled for oppressive or emancipatory purposes, questions
of ethics explicitly or, more often, implicitly, permeate all scholarship.
These ideas add an ethical component that identifies the diagnostic and recon-
structive dimensions of critical social theory. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake
speaks to the normative goal of truth. Traditional social theory contents itself with
deconstructing and/or diagnosing social problems; critical social theory aims to
remedy those social problems, seeing reconstructing society from the rubble of

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 138 patricia hill collins

deconstruction as just as if not more important than analysis. Here a framework that
valorizes ethics replaces the value neutrality of traditional theory.
Third, critical social theory expresses a reflective accountability concerning its
own practice. On the surface, critical social theory and traditional social theory
share this core value. Yet what is included in the scope of self-reflexivity matters.
Because traditional social theory brackets out the effects of power relations on its
own practices, it focuses on the standards of a much smaller, historically homo-
geneous community of practitioners in science or philosophy. Self-reflexivity may
occur but also produces important blind spots. In contrast, critical social theory
would contain a critical reflexivity both about its own practices and how its social
location within power relations shape those practices. This attentiveness to social
location mandates that intersectionality should take into account its own participa-
tion in creating the society that it aims to understand and shape. For intersection-
ality, a theory engaged in a dialectical analysis would recognize that its own
knowledge claims and practices cannot be benign, but instead contribute to and
reflect intersecting systems of power in which it is situated. Jose Medina provides
a greatly expanded understanding of how the concept of reflexivity links to an
epistemology of resistance.
Finally, critical social theory advances a distinctive theory of how social change
has been and might be brought about. As Horkheimer describes it, “theory has
a historically changing object which, however, remains identical amid all the
changes” (Horkheimer, 1982: 239). Critical theory views change as inherent to
society; it also posits that societies all contain certain core principles that remain
the same even though they may change form and expression. Building on
Horkheimer’s logic, intersecting power relations shape changing-same social for-
mations grounded not in linear, evolutionary processes, but rather in human agency.
Change may be vital for critical social theory, but the question is, which aspects of
the changing same merit critical social theory’s attention? Intersectional projects that
focus on social inequality, the power relations that catalyze them, and the social
problems that show social inequality in action constitute the entity that merits
change.
This issue of a commitment to social change seems to be an important distinction
between traditional and critical social theory. Craig Calhoun (1995) identifies the
idea of sameness and difference as the overarching theme for contemporary social
theory, and certainly one that would be endorsed by Simon’s contemporary critical
theorists (Simons, 2010). Whereas social change and difference constitute important
objects of investigation, in this essay, I have explicitly pointed to the theme of social
inequality as a competing object of investigation for intersectionality, precisely to
challenge the seemingly hegemonic identity frame and its spinoff of similarities and
differences and its implications for individual change. Yet when it comes to critical
social theory, Calhoun’s more important point lies in identifying change as a process
of imagining new possibilities for society. Calhoun suggested that critical social
theory “exists largely to facilitate a constructive engagement with the social world
that starts from the presumption that existing arrangements . . . do not exhaust the
range of possibilities. It seeks to explore the ways in which our categories of thought

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 Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory 139

reduce our freedom by occluding recognition of what could be” (Calhoun, 1995:
xviii).
Many scholars increasingly turn to the idea of imagination as an important
vehicles for knowledge production within communities of inquiry generally, and
for oppressed people in particular. Within critical race theory, historian Robin
D. G. Kelley organizes his monograph on African-American activism under the
theme of a “black radical imagination” that is focused on change (Kelley, 2002).
Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002) discuss the situated imagination as a crucial
component of feminist standpoint theory (2002: 316), pointing to the ways in
which social positioning shapes knowledge as well as the imagination. This
approach yields one important insight for critical social theory: individuals and
groups are differently positioned in a distinctive matrix of domination, which has
implications for how we experience society including not only what we know but
also what we can imagine (Collins, 2000; see also Collins, 2019).

Implications
First, because knowledge projects change and shift over time, we should be
cautious of categorizing the ideas of any given social theory, especially intersection-
ality, as inherently traditional or critical. Instead, ideas such as intersectionality gain
meaning though their use. Theories of positivist science can be alternately traditional
and critical, depending on the use to which they are put. Similarly, post-structuralism
is situated in a creative yet conflicted tension between aspirations toward both
critical social theory and traditional social theory. The meaning of the theory lies
in its use, not solely in the substance of its ideas. Building a theory of what
constitutes critical social theory using the content of a given theory or set of social
theorists is shortsighted. Instead, the standards applied to intersectionality itself,
instead of focusing on what it means to do intersectionality may be a better frame for
theory in general and for understanding critical social theory in particular.
Second, this essay suggests that critical intent or simply claiming that intersec-
tionality is critical is insufficient for intersectionality’s engagement as critical social
theory. A project can vociferously proclaim to be “critical,” yet its practices may
undermine its proclamations. Intersectionality may thus dispute dominant social
theory concerning social inequality from within the putative political safety provided
by working within traditional norms. In this fashion, intersectionality as social theory
can have critical intentions without meeting the additional risk-taking criteria of self-
reflexive political engagement, claiming an ethical stance, or imagining new social
possibilities that are associated with critical theory. Much empirical work that draws
on intersectional frameworks with critical intent is situated within the overarching
framework of traditional social theory.
Finally, intersectionality’s theoretical dimensions will deepen not only via
internal dialogues, but also through critical engagement with multiple social
theories that speak to varying aspects of its raison d’être. Placing intersectionality
in dialogue with a range of social theories, traditional and critical, provides

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 140 patricia hill collins

multiple lenses for specific intersectional projects as well as intersectionality writ

large. Rushing prematurely to choose one theory and force it on intersectionality
as the so-called answer to its theoretical deficiencies or worse yet, using one
hegemonic theory to criticize intersectionality in order to move beyond it seems
shortsighted. With relationality as a core premise of intersectionality, intersection-
ality’s relationship to multiple social theories remains open and ongoing. This
approach is aligned with drawing important ideas from more than one theory to
see what is of value to an intersectional project (a better understanding of social
inequality and what can be done to dismantle it). Developing intersectionality as
social theory involves placing the ideas in dialogue with a range of social theories,
traditional and critical, both inside and outside the academy, that further its goals.
Via these dialogues, intersectionality would be in a better position to criticize both
the substance and the terms of its own practice, with an eye toward changing
them.

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