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Intersectionality provides an understanding of social inequalities and power as complex, interlinked, shifting and multifaceted, constituting both penalties and privileges. In other words, our experiences of power and inequality are constituted not simply by, say, our gender identity or our racialized and class positionings but also by the multiple places we occupy on the many salient and changing axes of power that exist at any given time. Importantly, it is an approach in which analysis and political practice are closely linked. The concept has a long history emerging from black feminist struggle and critical race studies.

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women. We are rarely recognized as a group separate and distinct from black men, or as a present part of the larger group ‘women’ in this culture. (hooks 1981: 7)

So wrote bell hooks in her introduction to Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. The phrase ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ was a quotation from a speech delivered in 1851 by the African American campaigner Sojourner Truth for both the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. hooks’s intervention was important in the history of second-wave feminism, as were other activist writings which spoke to an experience in which the race and gender of women of colour decentred them within both feminist and anti-racist/black movements (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995; Hull et al. 1982; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Lewis and Parmar 1983; Hill Collins 1990). The crucial analytical point to emerge was that race, gender and class could not be understood as single or even incremental axes of oppression but, rather, as interconnected modalities of power that reconstitute identity, experience and practice in specific ways. Intersectionality emerged as the analytic concept in the 1980s to encapsulate this political and institutional problem of invisibility, elaborated by the socio-legal black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1989). The term became more widespread after the turn of the twenty-first century in a different political and intellectual context, particularly with respect to continuing and widening inequalities, increasing migration and gender diversity. It was to develop critical methodological, empirical and political insights which could be applied to a range of interconnected and contingent social relations and exercises of power (McCall 2005; Lutz et al. 2011; Cho et al. 2013; May 2015; Wilson 2013; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Carastathis 2016; Hancock 2016; Bone 2017; Romero 2018; Irvine et al. 2019; Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery 2019; and, especially, Nash 2019).

For social policy, the importance of an intersectional approach speaks to its potential to critically analyse the complexities of social power and inequalities as well as guiding transformative possibilities for social justice. It operates as theory, method and praxis. It concentrates on excavating the lived experience. It works not as a grand and totalizing theory but as an ‘orientation’ (May 2015: 3), a way of thinking about complexity, contingency and connectedness in social and political phenomena, and a refusal to reduce phenomena to single causes or solutions. These days, intersectionality denotes as much a political position as a conceptual approach, although, to be honest, the word is too long for a placard and too clumsy as a rallying cry. Nevertheless, what it marks is the importance of alliances across difference as a path to transformative change. This has clear relevance to social policy’s concerns with understanding social inequalities and social justice, how to research and make visible those that are hidden, and how to think about the solidarities that can reinscribe universalism with difference.

In recent years intersectionality has begun to be applied to social movements and practice, to politics, and to social and public policy intervention (Wilson 2013; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery 2019; Bassel and Emejulu 2018; WBG and Runnymede Trust 2017; Williams 2018; Irvine et al. 2019). The key characteristics of these applications of intersectionality are their attention to the complexity of social inequalities and power and their focus on change and fluidity, challenging fixed and essentialist approaches in which social positions or economic systems are seen as given, natural or overdetermining. Relationality, the contingencies of time and place, the contested, contradictory and unsettled nature of phenomena (including welfare states, their policies and practices) also characterize intersectional policy analysis, as do ideas that emerge from the margins and inform resistance. As Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery note, it thus enables an understanding of

the differential impacts of policy on diverse populations … it draws attention to aspects of policy that are largely uninvestigated or ignored altogether: the complex ways in which multiple and interlocking inequities are organized and resisted in the process, content and outcomes of policy. In so doing, the exclusionary nature of traditional methods of policy, including the ways in which problems and populations are constituted, given shape and meaning, is revealed. (Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery 2019: 2)

Intersectionality is not without its criticisms.³ It is important to note that, as a theoretical orientation, intersectionality has different versions and applications (McCall 2005). It has been criticized for becoming an abstract academic theory – a new (or not so new) ‘buzzword’ – which depoliticizes the very forces that brought it into being (Davis 2008). Another ‘depoliticizing’ criticism suggests that, while purporting to be about the multiple and intersecting relations of inequality, the focus on subjective identities and on local, lived experiences in intersectional analysis obfuscates the explanatory power that connects inequality and oppression to global capitalism. Avoiding these pitfalls requires, first, the recollection that the origins of intersectionality in black feminism lie firmly in the struggle against social, cultural, political and economic injustices. Thus, it is important to keep the concept and practice of such contestation central to any contemporary analysis. It is this that protects against reification and depoliticization; and it is this that differentiates it from a mapping of multicultural diversity disconnected from the challenges such diversity makes or is subjected to. Second, one of the promises of intersectional analysis lies in the capacity to link everyday intersubjective experiences to the wider systemic patterns of power and privilege. This means making clear the connections between social, cultural, political and economic injustices so that the nature of the political economy – a form of global financialized capitalism which is patriarchal and racializing – becomes an essential part of the frame of analysis in a way that is neither reductionist nor singly causal, nor monolithic, but allows for its contradictory nature. In synthesizing a critical and an intersectional social policy analysis in this book, the intention is to enhance each in a way that is attentive to the criticisms of both, to build an analysis which can follow through to its political implications.

In the previous chapter I drew attention to the UK Social Policy Association’s report on the continuing marginalization of race and racism in social policy teaching. I have explained in this chapter how this marginalizing effect can be seen in other inequalities research but is most marked for race and racism scholarship. In that context, does using an analysis that focuses on the intersections of different social relations of inequality obscure the racialized differences that really matter? A similar argument from a different perspective might be: by focusing on the intersections between different power relations, I am bound to dilute the entrenched and systematic patterns of gender subordination (or disability, or sexuality, or childhood). Obviously this is possible, but intersectionality is a method that depends on prior understanding of different social relations of power. Applying it requires sensitivity to the contingent nature of political context and to the question of salience. In other words, we have to understand the historical, material and cultural specificities of particular forms of social relations: to be aware of the variability in social, economic, cultural and political salience of different social relations at different times and places to the issues we are researching.

One example of this, which is discussed in chapter 4, is the salience of the social relations of race and racism in understanding the disproportionately higher mortality rates in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic for BAME groups (from around four times higher than white counterparts and similarly reflected in other Western countries). It was experiential evidence from BAME groups that began to unlock the role of systemic racism in these deaths and eventually, under pressure, to be recognized by Public Health England (2020a). An intersection of racially subordinated social positions in the labour market, especially as key workers and in the least valued areas of social care and geriatric care, in precarious work, in overcrowded housing, along with morbidity rates associated with health inequalities, placed BAME men and women at greater risk (Qureshi et al. 2020b; Lawrence 2020; Patel et al. 2020). Digging deeper reveals the specific ways in which different forms of racism contribute to these disparities and intersections. For example, all those poverty-related conditions – work, insecurity, housing and neighbourhood – carry greater risks to ill health, and ill health predisposes to severe illness and death from the virus. However, it is the intersection of these with racisms that intensifies health inequalities for BAME groups (IHE 2020). This includes institutional racism that prevents minority groups from accessing, for example, job opportunities or promotions and structural racism in which negative discourses (a ‘hostile environment’) shape interpersonal encounters. The greater the exposure to everyday racial micro-aggressions and the emotional labour involved in managing them – what Claudia Rankine (2014: 11) calls ‘trying to dodge the build-up of erasure’ – itself also generates ill health.⁴ As I explain in chapter 4, the generalities attached to the virus and its mitigation strategies worked in specific and intersecting ways both within and across inequalities of class, race, gender, age and disability. It is this dynamic between the general, specific and intersecting which marks the capacity of an intersectional analysis to understand the complexity of social phenomena.

For the analysis in this book, the contemporary context of welfare states and political struggle demands an analysis that can capture not only these intersections of inequality but also those interconnections between different areas of crisis which help shape them. The crises of financialized capital, of care and social reproduction, of climate change and of the racializing of borders are further made salient by the struggles they have provoked (see chapters 3, 5 and 7). This highlights, for example, the salience of bordering practices within the UK’s austerity welfare state in which the processes of restricting the rights of asylum seekers have been extended to different categories of benefit claimant. Such connection requires a frame of analysis that allows for the interconnections without reneging on the specificities of gender or race or class (see chapter 4). That said, it is a tricky exercise where I am aware of the limitations in the scope of my knowledge (see appendix II).

A final note on the pitfalls of intersectionality involves not assuming parallels between different forms of difference in the eagerness to seal solidarities. In her critique of crip theory, Kirstin Marie Bone (2017) argues that, while crip theory, like queer theory, seeks to break down the binary of disabled/able-bodied, some versions do so at the expense of obscuring the voices of diversity in disability identities. ‘Crip’, an ironical reclaiming of ‘cripple’, she argues, privileges visible disabilities and shifts too quickly into assuming that crip theories of disability are parallel or a subset of queer theory (she cites McRuer 2006). Such claims fail to understand the place of ‘rhetorical adjacency’ in which solidarity is expressed by being alongside disabled people in their struggles, not speaking for them or as them by claiming ‘crip’ identity as an able-bodied person (Bone 2017: 1308). By contrast, ‘transversal politics’ has been one way of describing the communication of ‘rooting and shifting’ that is required between activist groups to develop coalitional solidarities (Massey 1999; Yuval-Davis 1999), which is discussed in chapter 7. The main point here is that, both in theory and in action, attention is required on how to avoid ‘universalistic politics (that overemphasizes commonalities to the neglect of differences) … and particularistic politics (that overemphasize differences to the neglect of commonalities)’ (Irvine et al. 2019: 8).

An important contribution to refining the methodology of intersectionality is Leslie McCall’s work (McCall 2005). She distinguishes between three approaches. Representing these on a continuum, the first, and probably least used, is anticategorical complexity, which focuses on deconstructing analytical categories and rendering them fluid and constantly unstable. The second, intracategorical complexity, retains a critical eye to the boundaries by which categories are defined and constructed but is interested in the points of intersection between multiple categories and their shifting social relations. This approach reveals the erasure of those experiences forged through such intersections (as in the original meaning of intersectionality in black feminist struggle and the point made by Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery in the quotation above). The third approach, intercategorical complexity, while acknowledging the fluidity of social categories, nevertheless employs them as ‘anchor points’ (Glenn 2002, cited in McCall 2005: 1785) in order to investigate, indeed to measure, the extent and shifting of social relations of inequality between and across multiple groups. This follows a strategic categorizing in order to generate a more complex and comparative picture of power and inequality. It focuses not on the ways single groups transect different forms of subordination and domination but on the overall patterns across multiple groups. This, McCall argues, is the least practised of the three approaches but is the one which she unfolds when drawing upon her quantitative analysis of patterns of class and racial inequalities among women in the United States (McCall 2001). The emerging picture is one of complexity in which no single dimension of inequality predominates and in which the context of place in particular shapes the patterns of class, race and gender inequalities. Such an approach is important in that it goes beyond the use in quantitative methods of social categories as static variables and it is particularly useful to social policy in which the measurement of poverty and inequality is integral to its subject matter.

I return in the conclusion to the ways intersectionality is used in this book. For now, I draw out the main points of a critical approach to social policy.