Agency and ontology within intersectional analysis: a critical realist contribution

Introduction

This article will explore one of the most important and influential currents within contemporary feminist analysis, namely, intcrsectionality. Intersectional analysis was developed by black women scholars who identified important absences, both political and theoretical, in feminist and other strands of antiracist and critical theory (Crenshaw 1989). The success of intcrsectional theory has been in its bringing together of activist political concerns with poststructuralist sensibilities. As Kathy Davis (2008, p. 74) argues, intcrsectional theory has been remarkably successful in overcoming the apparent incompatibilities between these two projects.

It takes up the political project of making the social and material consequences of the categories of gcndcr/race/class visible but docs so by employing the methodologies compatible with the post-structuralist project of deconstructing categories, unmasking universalism, and exploring the dynamic and contradictory workings of power.

This is a seductive combination. Davis has argued that the ambiguities and contradictions within intcrsectional theory, rather than being a problem, are the source of its productivity. In this article, I will explore some of these contradictions and tensions, and suggest that while they do indeed contribute to the theory’s popularity, they limit its explanatory potential.

Pointing to the gaps and slippages within intcrsectional theory is not new (Anthias 1998). However, I argue that we can draw on critical realism, notably, the work of Margaret Archer (1995, 1996, 2000, 2007, 2012), as a resource to reconceptualisc what the research projects of intcrsectional theory might be. Intcrsectional theory is productive of numerous research questions at different levels of analysis but rather than celebrating, as Davis docs, the blurring of distinctions between different projects and analytical levels, I suggest that critical realism offers a way of unpacking them. The challenge faced by intcrsectional analysis is that analytical distinctions between structure and agency, and between culture and agency, are elided. By equivocating between experiences of oppression and the structures that produce them, the historicity of emergence is collapsed.

This is particularly the case in post-structuralist and other anti-catcgorical accounts in which, as pointed out by Angela Martinez Dy, Lee Martin and Sue Marlow, ‘notions of positionality or structural discrimination arc often collapsed into the concept of “identity”’ (2014, p. 454, ch. 6 this volume, p.149). Notions of identity arc insufficient to the analytical task of providing accounts of the contextual conditions and structural components that engender (or inhibit) them. Along with other authors (Walby, Armstrong and Strid 2012; Martinez Dy, Martin and Marlow 2014; Gunnarsson 2017, ch. 8 this volume) I will argue that critical realism has much to offer. In particular, it avoids elisions between structural processes and the identity work of persons: in Archerian terms (1995), between structurally emergent properties (SEPs), culturally emergent properties (CEPs), and the emergent properties of people (PEPs). Critical realism challenges linguistic notions of identity and offers an account of ‘being human’ (Archer 2000) and of the sui generis powers of persons (the PEPs), not just of social structures. I will argue that such an account of agency is important to sustain the normative intent of intersectional analysis and the political projects that underpin it.

Accordingly, the article is structured in four parts: the first deals with the emergence of intcrscctional theory and its antinomies and elisions. The second introduces some of the key concepts from critical realism, with a specific focus on morphogenesis. The third involves an analysis of agency, since personal and corporate agency arc central to understanding why intcrscctional theory matters. Finally, I will reprise why I think that critical realism is a better theoretical resource than post-structuralism, notwithstanding the many important insights feminist post-structuralist theorists have contributed to the analysis of the intersections between gender, race, class and other markers of structural and cultural difference.