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Our three uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool – namely, how the FIFA World Cup illuminates intersecting power relations, the growing recognition of economic inequality as a global social problem, and how intersectionality unfolded within the black women’s movement in Brazil – may seem quite different from one another. But together they shed light on six core ideas within intersectionality: social inequality, intersecting power relations, social context, relationality, social justice, and complexity. Just as these themes reappear, albeit in different forms, within intersectionality itself, they repeat in different ways throughout this book. We briefly introduce them here, develop them in future chapters, and return to them in Chapter 8.

First, each of the three cases discussed above sheds light on intersectional analyses of social inequality, albeit from very different vantage points. The case of FIFA World Cup football contrasts the depiction of fairness on football’s playing field with social inequalities of gender, race, nation, and class that characterize FIFA’s business practices. In contrast, the case of how growing global inequality came to the attention of ISA and the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism emphasizes how intersectionality might inform different explanations for economic inequality. Philosophies of social democracy and neoliberalism that shape public policies have important effects on the economic inequality that characterizes social inequality. The Afro-Brazilian women’s movement explores how social movements constitute important political responses to national patterns of social inequality, in this case, the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and national identity. Recognizing that social inequality is rarely caused by a single factor, intersectionality adds additional layers of complexity to understandings of social inequality. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool moves beyond seeing social inequality through race-only or class-only lenses and instead, understands social inequality through the interactions among various categories of power.

Second, these cases highlight different dimensions of intersecting power relations as well as political responses to them. The case of the FIFA World Cup illustrates how intersecting power relations are organized and operate in a social institution where the ideology of fair play masks significant power differences. This case introduces how intersecting power relations are to be analyzed both via specific intersections – for example, of racism and sexism, or capitalism and heterosexism – as well as across domains of power – namely, structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. The case of global social inequality shows how intersectional frameworks that take power relations into account, especially those that analyze how nation-state power works with different philosophies of social democracy and neoliberalism, raise new questions about global social inequality. In contrast, the Afro-Brazilian women’s movement emphasizes how everyday people organize to oppose intersecting power relations that harm them. By examining how black women in Brazil organized to resist multiple forms of social inequality, black women’s activism illustrates how community organizing and grassroots involvement generated intersectional analysis and praxis.

These cases illuminate a third core theme of intersectional analysis, namely, the importance of examining intersecting power relations in a social context. Because analyzing intersectionality in a global social context is a strong theme of this book, we have selected cases that offer different lenses on intersectionality in a global context, taking care to highlight national contexts as well as particular contexts within them. Contextualization is especially important for intersectional projects produced in the Global South. Just as the women athletes from South Africa, Jamaica, and Nigeria encountered obstacles when playing FIFA World Cup soccer, so scholars and activists working in nation-states of the Global South face difficulties in reaching wider audiences. We selected the case of the black women’s movement in Brazil to illustrate how many of intersectionality’s more prominent ideas reflect the specific concerns of a group within specific social contexts – in this case, black women within the Brazilian nation-state with a history of slavery and colonialism. Just as Afro-Brazilian feminism situates intersectionality within a Brazilian context, so too might other expressions of intersectionality require a similar contextualization. The analysis of the World Cup examined the global contours of intersecting power relations. The analysis of growing recognition of global economic inequality emphasizes the importance of nation-state policies and the social contexts of government institutions.

Fourth, these cases point to how relationality informs all aspects of intersectionality. Relationality embraces a both/and analytical framework that shifts focus from seeing categories as oppositional, for example, the differences between race and gender, to examining their interconnections. Relationality takes various forms within intersectionality and is found in terms such as “coalition,” “solidarity,” “dialog,” “conversation,” “interaction,” and “transaction.” But the terminology is less important than seeing how this shift in perspective toward relationality opens up new possibilities for intersectionality’s inquiry and praxis. For example, regarding inquiry, the case of global economic inequality illustrates how class-only arguments may be insufficient to explain global social inequality, and that intersectional analyses that examine the relationships among class, race, gender, and age might be more valuable. Similarly, regarding praxis, the Afro-Brazilian women’s movement illustrates how intersectionality emerged within coalition building for an intergenerational social movement.

Fifth, these cases highlight the complexity of doing critical intersectional analysis. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool is difficult, precisely because intersectionality itself is multifaceted. Because intersectionality aims to understand and analyze the complexity in the world, it requires intricate strategies to do so. Rather than proclaiming that complexity is important, we aimed to demonstrate through our case selection the multifaceted nature of intersectionality. Each of our cases is a highly abbreviated rendition of a far more complex intersectional argument. Starting with a well-known social institution (FIFA), or an important social problem (social inequality), or a seemingly invisible political phenomenon (black women’s movement) involves incorporating ever more complex levels of analysis. Intersections of race and gender can identify the need for class analysis, or viewing intersections of nation and sexuality can highlight the need for other categories of analysis. This level of complexity is not easy for anyone to handle. It complicates things and can be a source of frustration for scholars, practitioners, and activists alike. Yet complexity is not something that one achieves by using intersectionality as an analytic tool, but rather something that deepens intersectional analysis.

Finally, some commitment to social justice has historically informed much of intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis. We selected these cases to introduce intersectionality because they all illuminate how intersectionality’s use as a critical analytic tool is connected to a social justice ethos. What makes an intersectional project critical lies in its connection to social justice. For example, our analysis of global economic inequality illustrates how fostering social justice requires complex analyses of global economic inequality.

Yet because intersectionality’s ties to social justice may not be self-evident, the need to pursue a social justice agenda as an essential dimension of intersectionality remains contentious. Many people believe that social ideals, such as the belief in meritocracy, fairness, and the reality of democracy, have already been achieved. For them, there is no global crisis of social inequality because economic inequality is the outcome of fair competition and fully functioning democratic institutions. Social inequality can exist without it being socially unjust. Our cases challenge this view, suggesting that FIFA reproduces social inequality in ways that are neither fair nor just. Social justice is elusive in unequal societies where the rules may seem fair, yet differentially enforced through discriminatory practices, the case of Brazil’s racial democracy. Social justice is also elusive where the rules themselves may appear to be equally applied to everyone, yet still produce unequal and unfair outcomes: in social democracies and neoliberal nation-states, everyone may have the “right” to vote, but not everyone has equal access to do so, and not everyone’s vote counts the same.

Our goal in this book is to democratize the rich and growing literature of intersectionality – not to assume that only African American students will be interested in black history, or that LGBTQ youth will be the only ones interested in queer studies, or that intersectionality is for any one segment of the population. Rather, we invite our readers to use intersectionality as an analytic tool to examine a range of topics such as those discussed here. In this chapter, we have introduced selected main ideas within intersectionality by using intersectionality as an analytical tool. In Chapters 2 and 3, we further examine intersectionality’s analytical framework by introducing the distinction between intersec-tionality as a form of inquiry and as praxis and by tracing the emergence of these ideas. In Chapters 4 and 5, we return to the use of intersectionality as an analytical tool by showing its utility for analyzing global phenomena – specifically, human rights, reproductive rights, digital media, global social protest, and neoliberal state policies. In Chapters 6 and 7, we take up identity politics and critical education as two important issues that have shaped intersectionality as discourse. Our concluding chapter revisits the challenges of using intersectionality as an analytic tool, as well as the varying forms that its core themes of social inequality, relationality, power, social context, complexity, and social justice can and might assume.